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Comment by bcaa7f3a8bbc | Hacker News Reader

> The war that Symbolics started was what wiped out MIT, but there were other events going on then. There were people giving up on cooperation, and together this wiped out the community and there wasn't much left.

The internal struggle in the MIT AT Lab due to Lisp and Symbolics seems more interesting than I thought. I read Wikipedia, and it says "there were two AI Lab people who choose not to be employed by either: Richard Stallman and Marvin Minsky". Wow, I never expected to see these two names in the same line.

Are there any good book that covers this part of the history and its connection to the later development of free software movement?

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Dan Weinreb had a different take on the symbolics era and the MIT lab.

[1]: https://danluu.com/symbolics-lisp-machines/

Thanks for the link - that puts quite a different perspective on those events. I had the luck to get to know Dan Weinreb during the International Lisp Conference 2009 in Boston - great guy.

It should be too surprising as it took place at the MIT, but many of the founders of Lisp were present. Dan, Guy Steele, Richard Gabriel, JonL White, and so many more. It was really inspiring.

Interestingly, though the ILC is a conference about all flavous of Lisp and its applications, RMS wasn't attending the conference.

I was at an Emacs Lisp introduction course given by Richard Stallman, at some ILC.

All I can see is a man pathetically trying to justify himself, and failing.

To some degree, Levy's "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" (1984) covers this, but probably not to the detail you want. He has a whole chapter on Stallman and the AI Lab. Of course a problem was that in 1984 the modern importance of free software wasn't really apparent. Stallman looks principled in the book but sort of a fool because it looked like the people who went to industry would become rich and Stallman's "GNU" project looked like the impractical utopian dreams of an aging hippie, not the source of software used in millions of computers (and other devices not even thought of yet) in the future.

> Of course a problem was that in 1984 the modern importance of free software wasn't really apparent.

Perhaps it wasn't apparent widely, but it was certainly clear to MSFT and IBM. IBM lawyers at the time refused to allow RMS to come speak at the Watson lab where I worked, because of his ideas about free software.

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