Buckman on SLUG: What do users REALLY want?

[Paul Pangaro <pan%athena.pangaro.dialnet.symbolics.com@RELAY.CS.NET>]

    Date: Fri, 12 Jan 90 23:58 PST
    From: rsk@SAMSON.cadr.dialnet.symbolics.com (Robert S. Kirk)

	Date: Fri, 12 Jan 90 15:13:18 CST
	From: "BUCKMAN%ALAN.kahuna.decnet.lockheed.com"%ALAN.kahuna.DECNET.LOCKHEED.COM@Warbucks.AI.SRI.COM
	Date: Fri, 12 Jan 90 13:09 PST
	From: Eric Buckman <BUCKMAN@ALAN.kahuna.decnet.lockheed.com>
	    Date: Thu, 11-Jan-90 22:12:54-PST
	    Date: Thu, 11 Jan 90 17:18 EST
	    From: Moon@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM (David A. Moon)
[...]
    Some time ago I was quite puzzled when our local service people were (or
    claimed) ignorance of the IFU hardware problems and we had to print out
    all the SLUG mail on the subject for them so they could see that other
    customers were having the same problem.

The role of information exchange to and from users and Symbolics is a
constant theme of SLUG interactions. There are recent promises of
improvements which at last seem to have some specifics behind them, but
the effects have not trickled to users yet so far as I can tell.

[...]

    Gee wiz, are you saying Symbolics is a CASE company?!  I can never seem
    to get your sales and marketing people to admit it -- but I'm at a loss
    to provide any other (honest) description of what LispMs all about.  And
    while Symbolics sits around trying to figure out what market its in, the
    rest of the world is busy duplicating Symbolics' functionality and
    calling it CASE!  Its not a nice feeling to watch this happening.

Thank you for noticing, and sigh. Major themes (and certainly opening
talks, because I gave them) at the SLUG conferences since '86 have made
this point. In "the old days" (early 1980s) when LISP was going to save
the world, the company said this was because of AI, not CASE issues. In
the present day I can't make sense out any policy.

Best,
PANgaro