Re: Need a ride to LUV-91?

[Arun Welch <welch@cis.ohio-state.edu>]

>Unfortunately, there's a lot of that going around.  I was hoping to
>meet some optimistic people at LUV...

Actually, I'm pretty optimistic about the work for Venue, and the OSU
problems are generally due to other issues (like putting lots of eggs in 
the DARPA basket, the head of the group going off for a years sabatical,
stuff like that). When I'm feeling down about the Lisp world JonL's always
fun to talk to, if he's there we'll have to go to dinner.

>I'm not that up on that part of Lisp history.  So the Xerox Common Lisp
>group spun off?

Well, I'm the right person to talk to, I headed the user group for
mostof it's existence.  The AI division of Xerox (XAIS) was really
hampered by the fact that all business decisions had to be made
through Xerox corporate, so they convinced Xerox to sping them off.
Xerox did so, but installed Xerox management, who had no idea how to
run a small company. Venue had 40 people, lavish facilities, etc., at
a point when they'd already lost a chunk of market share to the Common
Lisp crowd (ask me about *that* story sometime). Xerox also managed to
set things up initially so that they got the software for free from
Venue, when in fact they were the biggest customer. So, large outlays
of $, little coming in, and the inevitable happened about 9 months
later. They hired the head of product development to keep supporting
their installed base (which is pretty huge), and he eventually formed
Venue to be a seperate entity and take the system off their hands.
Venue's biggest customer is still Xerox, followed by assorted other
folks. We're also expanding into other markets, like hypertext and
(hopefully) OOPS.

>  And are now located in Ohio?

Nope, Venue itself is in San Carlos, CA, but the development staff is
spread out, with one person in Maryland, me in Ohio, and the rest in
California. 

>I'm curious about what's going on in Ohio both because I trying to
>encourage cooperative work based on CMU CL,

I'd be happy to talk about cooperative work with CMU CL. We did use
the earlier version on our RT's, but were kinda hampered at the time
with the lack of PCL/CLOS and instability of the hardware. Also, I must
admit, at the time we were heavily invested in GUI's, and this even
predated CLX, so there just wasn't anything useable then. At this
point I doubt we'd have much trouble converting over from Allegro to
CMU CL, since the neural nets and SOAR folks don't use CLOS at all,
and nobody's using anything beyond FORMAT for output either. Does the
latest release support CLOS or PCL? 

>and also because (due to my wife's commute) there is the outside
>chance I might want to move near OSU if there is something to do.

Gee, I wish there was more Lispy stuff around here, I'd love to have
someone in the area to talk to. Right now our funding is pretty dry,
but should things change I'll let you know, or if anything else in the
area turns up. This damn AI winter can't last forever.

...arun