[bcaulf]

It's a little disingenuous for Franz to claim any credit for Nichimen. Nichimen N-Graphics was the spinoff of the Symbolics S-Graphics system, written in ZetaLisp. Symbolics ceased new development and there were customers for the graphics system, so it needed to be ported to a Lisp environment that would run on available hardware.

Franz Allegro CL is a further development of Maclisp, developed during Project MAC at MIT. ZetaLisp was also a direct development of Maclisp. I'm guessing this shared ancestry helped in the software porting and made Franz the natural choice for the N-Graphics. But the press release just blows a lot of smoke about the speed and scalability of Franz.

[lispm]

Why that? Symbolics S-Graphics was a graphics suite exclusively for the Symbolics Lisp Machines. N-World was a very different port of that to Allegro CL on SGI machines. That Allegro Cl was chosen and that this relatively complex piece on software ran on their Lisp is something they had any right to be proud of.

[e40]

> Franz Allegro CL is a further development of Maclisp

You are completely wrong. "Franz Lisp" was written to be compatible with Maclisp so that it could run Vaxima. "Allegro Common Lisp" was written from scratch with no relation to Franz Lisp or Maclisp.

[bcaulf]

I see now after more reading that I was wrong and you are right. Franz Lisp was a new implementation that was compatible with Maclisp and Allegro Lisp was a later new implementation. I'm sorry to have posted bad information.