Lucid Inc.#Initial success
{{about|the 1984-1994 software company|other companies|Lucid (disambiguation)}}
{{Infobox company
| name = Lucid Inc.
| logo =
| successor =
| fate = Bankruptcy (1994)
| location = Menlo Park, California
| foundation = {{Start date and age|1984}}
| defunct = {{Start date and age|1994}}
| key_people = Richard P. Gabriel, Scott Fahlman, Rodney Brooks
| industry = Software industry
| products = Lucid Common Lisp, Energize, Lucid Emacs
| website =
}}
Lucid Incorporated was a Menlo Park, California-based computer software development company. Founded by Richard P. Gabriel{{Citation |last=Steele |first=Guy L. |title=The evolution of Lisp |date=1996 |url=http://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/234286.1057818 |work=History of programming languages---II |pages=233–330 |editor-last=Bergin |editor-first=Thomas J. |access-date=2023-05-02 |place=New York, NY, USA |publisher=ACM |language=en |doi=10.1145/234286.1057818 |isbn=978-0-201-89502-5 |last2=Gabriel |first2=Richard P. |editor2-last=Gibson |editor2-first=Richard G.}} in 1984, it went bankrupt in 1994.
History
{{Unreferenced section|date=April 2013}}
The first CEO was Tony Slocum, formerly of IntelliCorp; and Gabriel was Lucid's Chief Technical Officer (CTO) and first president.
= Initial success =
The product the company ultimately shipped was an integrated Lisp IDE for Sun Microsystems' RISC hardware architecture—this sidestepped the principal failure of Lisp machines by in essence rewriting a lesser version of the Lisp machine IDE for use on a more cost-effective and less moribund architecture. In 1987, Gabriel resigned as President, but remained its CTO.
= Decline =
Eventually Lucid's focus shifted (during the AI Winter) from the Lisp market (which was still growing at this time) to an object-oriented IDE for C++ called "Energize". A core component of the IDE was Richard Stallman's version of Emacs, GNU Emacs. GNU Emacs was not suitable for Lucid's needs, however, and several Lucid programmers (including Jamie W. Zawinski) were assigned to help develop GNU Emacs to meet those needs. Friction arose between the programmers and Stallman, and Lucid forked the software—thus they were primarily responsible for the birth of XEmacs.{{cite web|last=Zawinski |first=Jamie |title=The Lemacs/FSFmacs Schism |year=2000 |url=http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html |access-date=2009-12-12 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20091130093142/http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html |archive-date=2009-11-30 |url-status=live }}
By 1994, Lucid's attempts to reinvent itself as a C++ company, and its neglect of its still profitable Lisp sideline had ended in failure, and the company's revenues fell to levels which could not sustain it. Lucid Incorporated went bankrupt.{{Citation needed|date=October 2022}} The rights to Lucid Common Lisp were sold to Harlequin Ltd. which was bought in 1999 by Global Graphics; Global Graphics then sold the rights to Xanalys Corporation, which spun off LispWorks, the current rights holder which sells Lucid Common Lisp under the "Liquid Common Lisp"{{cite web|url=http://www.lispworks.com/products/lcl.html |title=Liquid Common Lisp |publisher=Lispworks.com |access-date=2013-06-10}} label.
References
{{Reflist}}
External links
- [http://dreamsongs.com/Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf Patterns of Software]- a collection of essays by Gabriel, including some memoirs about Lucid (pdf)
- [http://www.dreamsongs.com/DiBona-OReillyLetter.html "Letter to Chris DiBona and Tim O'Reilly"]—(Open letter by Gabriel written about the XEmacs fork in response to the description of the fork in Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution [http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/toc.html Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution])
- [https://archive.org/details/archiveteam-lucid-collection Collection of Lucid's Source Code] — Includes Lucid Common Lisp, Energize (incomplete), Lucid Emacs.
Category:Lisp (programming language) software companies
Category:Defunct software companies of the United States
Category:Companies established in 1984