Lucid Incorporated was a Menlo Park,

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-based computer

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development company. Founded by Richard P. Gabriel in 1984, it went bankrupt in 1994.

History

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

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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

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GNU Emacs GNU Emacs is a text editor and suite of free software tools. Its development began in 1984 by GNU Project founder Richard Stallman, based on the Emacs editor developed for Unix operating systems. GNU Emacs has been a central component of the GNU ...

. 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. 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

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. 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" label.

References

{{Reflist

External links

''Patterns of Software''
a collection of essays by Gabriel, including some memoirs about Lucid (pdf)

��(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 Revolutionbr>Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution

Collection of Lucid's Source Code
— Includes Lucid Common Lisp, Energize (incomplete), Lucid Emacs. Lisp (programming language) software companies Defunct software companies of the United States Emacs Companies established in 1984 Companies disestablished in 1994 Companies based in Menlo Park, California