DRAFT Agenda for SLUG/SMBX Meeting of 15 December

[barmar@THINK.COM]

   Date: Mon, 18 Dec 89 17:15:22 -0600
   From: forbus@cs.uiuc.edu (Kenneth Forbus)

   A $10K-$15K "discount" on trade-in is a very bad joke.  Having paid
   premium prices once, and have Symbolics totally fail to protect our
   investment, why in heavens' name should we do it AGAIN???

In what way have they "failed to protect our investment"?  That phrase is
usually used when referring to computers that cannot run the latest
software (for instance, the original Macintosh is pretty obsolete, since it
doesn't have enough memory for most current applications).  L-machines are
still perfectly usable, and run all the current Lispm software, except
for those that make direct use of the VMEbus or the embedding host
interface.

   Given what I am hearing, I'm afraid my only option is to start
   scraping my Symbolics machines.  Use them until they break, and let
   them die with dignity.  Sigh.

Unfortunately, my management believes the same thing.  We're also reducing
our dependence on Lisp (contrary to our company's name, Thinking Machine's
primary market is now scientific computing, not AI, where Fortran and C are
the preferred languages), so there's not going to be as much need for a
good Lisp development environment.

						barmar