What did the final weeks/months of the AI Winter look like from the inside?

[pixel...@gmail.com]

One piece that I don't have many first hand accounts of is what it looked like from the inside when the AI Winter hit. I guess it's a fairly open ended question but I can only imagine it was depressing to see as a Lisp programmer. It seems Xerox et all must have purged the Lisp stuff pretty hard as there are very few physical artifacts around from my searches for physical manuals and such.

So if you feel comfortable to share, what did it feel like on the inside when decisions were made to drop Lisp machines? (Come to think of it, this kind of story from the inside would be great reading for the website because so many Lispers started after the AI Winters)

[Larry Masinter]

"This is the way the world ends ... not with a bang but a whimper". 

* There wasn't a cataclysmic event -- it was just that money for AI-specific hardware and software dried up over time, when people found other ways to solve the problems they were working on.  

* "as a Lisp programmer" makes it seem like a category and it wasn't really

* Xerox didn't "purge the Lisp stuff" as much as it just wasn't significant compared to Xerox's main businesses

* The "Lisp machines" were dinosaurs, suffering from "premature optimization".

Id recommend for a 1985 perspective:

    https://larrymasinter.net/85-ai-tutorial.pdf 

the first 24 slides of a 1985.two-day tutorial presentation about "AI Tools and Technologies"

First content slide:

* "Artificial Intelligence" is a goal, not a fact.

*  Tools and techniques are a by-product of research.

* Commercial applications of tools are very recent.

* The press has confused goals with current applications.

* Many vendors of AI technology do too.

* This isn't a new problem

* There is still serious research going on under the title "artificial intelligence"

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On Fri, Nov 14, 2025 at 8:22 PM pixel...@gmail.com <pixel...@gmail.com> wrote:

One piece that I don't have many first hand accounts of is what it looked like from the inside when the AI Winter hit. I guess it's a fairly open ended question but I can only imagine it was depressing to see as a Lisp programmer. It seems Xerox et all must have purged the Lisp stuff pretty hard as there are very few physical artifacts around from my searches for physical manuals and such.

So if you feel comfortable to share, what did it feel like on the inside when decisions were made to drop Lisp machines? (Come to think of it, this kind of story from the inside would be great reading for the website because so many Lispers started after the AI Winters)

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