[granularity]

I wasn't aware of the Symbolics / SDI connection:

> The market created by funding from SDI was quite forgiving. The government was interested in creating complex Lisp programs and Symbolics machines were the leading alternative at that time. Officials who allocated funds for SDI did not demand cost-effective results from their research funds and hence the expert-systems companies boomed during this period.

Sorry to be glib but, maybe we should be grateful we got an AI winter, not a nuclear winter.

[lispm]

Much of the AI research of the time was financed by the US military - not just for SDI.

For example the DART logistics planning system written in Lisp for the Gulf War was said to have paid back all investments into AI research up to that point.

[pinewurst]

It is amusing (in a way) to think about that era's protests from the likes of CPSR (Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility). Specifically that software systems of a certain complexity (LoC) weren't even possible - yet even current phones transcend these numbers by orders of magnitude.

[wrs]

It was a long time ago, but wasn’t the idea that systems of a certain complexity with a very high reliability are impossible? My phone, at least, is not a paragon of reliability.

[pinewurst]

I don’t think they were that clear about reliability metrics. It was obscure but the slightly older Safeguard ABM software load was of that order of complexity magnitude and tested reliability. Thank goodness of course we never had a real test. Admittedly I have a small axe to grind, having known some of those CPSR people.

[ncmncm]

I went to Hungary in '87 to present a paper on semiconductor point defects, funded by SDI money from AFNOR. Soviets were particularly interested in defects because their processes had a lot of them; their idea was to find a way to make the devices work right anyway. It is why they were always 10 years behind, and part of why the Mig 25 had vacuum tubes. (It did work...)