Symbolics/Intellicorp Announcement

[Scott McKay <SWM%sapsucker.scrc.symbolics.com@RELAY.CS.NET>]

    Date: Tue, 14 Mar 89 18:23 EST
    From: barmar@Think.COM (Barry Margolin)

	Date: Tue, 14 Mar 89 14:32 EST
	From: Mark@alderaan.scrc.symbolics.com (Mark Graffam)

	SYMBOLICS ANNOUNCES A JOINT DEVELOPMENT AGREEMENT WITH INTELLICORP
		  TO DELIVER KEE ON NEW SYMBOLICS WORKSTATIONS

    Does KEE do anything hardware specific that makes it less than trivial
    to port it to Ivory?  A fundamental design goal of Ivory was that it
    would be source-compatible with 3600, and in my (albeit limited)
    experience they met this goal adequately.  Porting a software-only
    system from 3600 to Ivory should not be much harder than porting from
    Genera 7.1 to 7.2 was.  I imagine that some interesting stuff could come
    out of the MacIvory side of this announcement (e.g. a MacIvory version
    of KEE that uses the Macintosh style of user interface), but what's the
    significance of the XL400 side of the agreement?

KEE is a large complex product.  It would be silly for a company like
Intellicorp to simply compile KEE for the MacIvory or XL400, and then ship
it to customers without doing any performance tuning or software QA.  For a
product like KEE, the job of porting it to a new platform like the XL400 is
has a large component of testing and QA.

See below.

    ----------------
    Date: Tue, 14 Mar 89 17:38 EST
    From: MILLER@vax.cam.nbs.gov

      RE:   SYMBOLICS ANNOUNCES A JOINT DEVELOPMENT AGREEMENT WITH INTELLICORP
		TO DELIVER KEE ON NEW SYMBOLICS WORKSTATIONS

	 Burlington, Mass., March 14, 1989 -- Symbolics, Inc., and Intellicorp,
       Inc., announced a joint development agreement to provide Intellicorp's 
       knowledge-based systems development environment on Symbolics' newest 
       workstations. Under the agreement, the companies will work together to
       provide a fully supported version of KEE (Knowledge Engineering 
       Environment)  for Symbolics' MacIvory and XL400 workstations. KEE is 
       currently supported on Symbolics 3600 series workstations.
	    ...

    I hate to be a killjoy but I keep hearing `You only have to recompile.'

You do only have to recompile to get a working version on the XL400 or
MacIvory.  However, it is naive to presume that the performance of any
complex software product is going to be the same on an Ivory-based machine
as it is on a 36xx, and naive to presume that an embedded system is going
to have the same performance as an unembedded system.

Some things on an Ivory-based platform will run faster than on the 3600,
some things might run slower; code which has been carefully optimized for
the 3600 might prove to be slower than one wants on the Ivory.  After all,
the architectures are quite different.

On embedded systems, there is also the issue of user-interface performance.
For example, when drawing graphics a user can choose between drawing things
exactly as they appear on the 36xx, or as they would appear when the host
does all the drawing.  The former might be necessary when graphics must look
exactly alike on all Symbolics platforms.  However, the latter alternative
has the potential of being much faster, as it is on the MacIvory.