[Info-vax] VAX Common Lisp

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 10/26/2022 11:01 AM, hb wrote:
> On 10/26/22 15:58, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> On 10/26/2022 6:44 AM, Robert Carleton wrote:
>>> So, who wound up with the intellectual property/source for VAX Common 
>>> Lisp? Is it LispWorks Ltd?
>>
>> I don't know Lisp so this may be a stupid question, but are there
>> any reason to believe DEC did not create VAX Lisp from scratch based
>> on language definition?
>>
>> If they did and they did not sell it off like Rdb and a few other
>> things, then IPR must have gone DEC->CPQ->HP->HPE and VSI
>> should have a license to use the source (the word here is
>> that VSI got license to everything VMS from HPE).
>>
>> Which will not help much as HPE has no interest in VMS any
>> longer and VSI will not see a business case for
>> migrating Lisp to Alpha/Itanium/x86-64.
> 
> According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX_Common_Lisp, VAX LISP was 
> sold to Lucid Inc. There is a wikipedia article about Lucid. It says 
> that Lucid went bankrupt in 1994 and Lucid Common Lisp was sold. VAX 
> LISP isn't mentioned. Lucid Common Lisp ended up at LispWorks, which 
> sells it under their own name: Liquid Common Lisp.

I guess I should have checked first before exposing my ignorance.

Then it does sound very plausible that IPR belongs to LispWorks.

And most likely they have long forgotten and lost source code
for VAX Lisp.

Arne