Update on Corporate Directions

[cook@PEGASUS.SCRC.Symbolics.COM (Kim Cook)]

March 28, 1990


Dear Symbolics Customer:

I would like to give you an update of recent events at 
Symbolics and review our major product plans and initiatives.  

Last year, I published a statement of our Corporate Directions 
to both meet urgent customer needs and to reach new markets 
based on four initiatives.  These were:  1) to support our 
customers with cost-effective, standards-based products for 
application development and delivery;  2) to continue to develop 
advanced object-based software products; 3) to offer our 
consulting expertise to accelerate our customers' success with 
Symbolics-based projects; and 4) to reach new customers in growing 
markets by developing turn-key application products, like our 
graphics products, that leverage our technology for non-programmer 
professionals.

We have made real progress on this plan.  Over the last twelve 
months we've introduced symbolic processing add-in boards for 
the Sun and Macintosh workstations and added-color graphics 
support for both our VME-based XL400 workstation and our MacIvory 
system.  We've improved the performance of this Macintosh-based 
system by over 1.5 times.  We've shipped the first phase of our 
software-only delivery products for personal computers.  And we've 
grown our consulting organization by six-fold. 

While I am pleased with the progress, we have more work to do to 
make our customers successful with their Symbolics-based applications.   
We have three short-term priorities. 

Commitment to complete our high-performance, software-only 
delivery environment by year end.  CLOE, our existing software-only 
delivery product, allows Common Lisp applications to run on IBM PC/2s 
or other Intel 80386-based personal computers without special hardware.  
The next release of CLOE, Release 3.0 available this summer, will 
support more sophisticated applications, using the CLOS object-oriented 
programming language and the CLIM user interface management system.  
By year end this product will be available on popular workstations.  
As evidence of our commitment to CLOE, we have dedicated leading 
members of our technical staff, including David Moon, Paul Robertson 
and Ken Sinclair, to this project.   

Industry-standard development environment for application 
portability . We have just announced Genera 8.0 which will be 
available next month.  One focus of this release is to address 
the development of applications using industry standards.  Genera 
8.0 includes support for CLOS, the emerging ANSI standard object 
system.  It also includes a development tool, the Common Lisp 
Developer.  This release will run on all Symbolics machines to ease 
development of applications.  CLIM support will follow in the next 
ECO release to Genera 8.0. 

Dramatic price/performance improvements.  Symbolics has accelerated 
work on performance enhancements and restructured our pricing to provide 
industry-competitive price/performance.  We will shortly  announce a 
new workstation with three times the speed of our fastest processor at 
2/3 off the original list price.  This new workstation uses a faster 
processor based on Rev. 4.0 of our Ivory processor chip.  We also have 
committed to developing a next-generation Ivory chip which will make 
even greater system performance gains possible. 

Recently we announced new pricing with reductions of up to 30% on 
selected configurations and with easy options to upgrade the performance 
of your existing systems.   Symbolics can now guarantee both industry 
competitive price/performance along with superior development productivity 
using our object-oriented software. 

We intend to maintain our price/performance advantage and our support 
for standards-based software solutions.  Our goal is to make our technology 
available to more people through turn-key applications and consulting.  
To this end, we recently announced the formation of five business units 
which will  concentrate on key markets where Symbolics' technology has 
enabled leading customers to succeed.   These markets are:  symbolic-based 
computing, graphics, hypertext documentation preparation and retrieval, 
interactive scheduling and planning (IS &P) and symbolic mathematical computing. 

I've reviewed our plans for the symbolic computing market.  I will briefly 
review our plans for the other business units.
	
Our graphics unit will focus on developing high performance graphic 
processors and improving the performance and functionality of its 
animation software for production users and the new corporate and engineering 
marketplaces.  On March 19th, we announced FrameThrower, the industry's first 
commercially available, high-definition video graphics processor and the 
XL400 high-definition Colorstation, the industry's first all-in-one HDTV 
workstation.  These two breakthrough products will enable our customers 
to develop high-performance, high-definition applications that can conform 
to current and future standards.  
	
The hypertext unit will focus on enhancing the functionality and user 
interface of Concordia, our hypertext software.  To make this advanced 
product more accessible and cost-effective within commercial organizations, 
we will shortly announce a PC-based document examiner.  
	
Our interactive scheduling and planning (IS &P) unit will assist major 
customers to successfully deliver their scheduling and planning applications 
by integrating all our advanced technology:  symbolic computing, expert systems, 
advanced user interface, hypertext, graphics and networking.  Some of these 
applications may become products for new customers.  
	
Finally, the symbolic mathematical computing unit will deliver its premier 
product, Macsyma, to more platforms building on the success of its newest 
CLOE-based PC version and support for a variety of minis and workstations.

Because we are transitioning to new products and business areas in a difficult 
economic climate, we have anticipated quarter-to-quarter fluctuations in our 
financial results.  We announced a loss in our second quarter and expect a similar 
loss in our third quarter.  In response, we have implemented expense reduction 
programs, which include a consolidation of our organization, that will allow us 
to realize a yearly savings of over five  million dollars.  We have no debt, 
an unused credit line, a solid cash position, and we believe that we have 
sufficient resources to complete our transition. 

Within the next few weeks you will hear more about new products and programs 
from our business units.  I also plan to be visiting many customers over 
the next few months and would welcome the opportunity to meet with you and 
discuss your specific needs.   We are excited about our product strategy 
and the opportunity to put it to work for our customers.

Sincerely, 


John S. Wurts
Chairman of the Board, Chief
Executive Officer and President