Oral History Of Richard Greenblat

[Tim Daly]

Interlisp (Inner Lisp :-) gets mentioned about page 38

[Paolo Amoroso]

Xerox Park sounds like a great playground.

On Sat, Dec 27, 2025 at 2:52 PM Tim Daly <axio...@gmail.com> wrote:

Interlisp (Inner Lisp :-) gets mentioned about page 38

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[Paul McJones]

Obviously neither Greenblatt nor Gardner Hendrie (who worked for Data General for many years, and then was in venture capital in Boston) proof-read this. If someone offered to proofread it, I bet CHM would agree to update the official version.

Bob Rowe and Tidelmann

Inner Lisp

Multix

Deck

List machines

caters => CADRs

Page Mill and Aristedero [ph?] Road

...

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[Nick Briggs]

Some of the transcriptions are sad/funny...

   "A road bust amount of secondary storage"

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[Matt Heffron]

I haven't read it yet, but it sounds like an EARLY (GPT-1 ?) AI transcription. 😯

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From: lisp...@googlegroups.com <lisp...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Nick Briggs <nicholas...@gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, December 27, 2025 10:27:35 AM
To: Paul McJones <pa...@mcjones.org>
Cc: Paolo Amoroso <paolo....@gmail.com>; Tim Daly <axio...@gmail.com>; Lisp Core <lisp...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: Oral History Of Richard Greenblat

 

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[Tim Daly]

Yeah Xerox Parc would have been a fun place to work.

Bell Labs was another. My friend worked there.

I worked at IBM Research in the Math Department but they let

me work on rewritable paper based on bacteriorhodopsin.

https://grokipedia.com/page/Bacteriorhodopsin

Rhodopsin is what your eyes use to perceive light. It changes

configuration (and color) based on light frequency. Thus with a

laser one can change color for write/erase of the plastic-based

paper, ideal for reuse. Stuff 5 pages into your laser printer and,

bang, you erase the old and create the new. Ultimate reuse.

Saves a few billion trees.

https://grokipedia.com/page/Rhodopsin

The fact that I spent time in the biology lab and the laser lab

while working on this fell FAR outside the Math Department remit.

I even got a patent for a slip-sensor for a robot hand. IBM Research

was a great place to work.

I played with Neural Networks following instructions from Rumelhart

and McClelland, trying to recognize drugs from their 3D structure.

Unfortunately it was on an IBM PC so, yeah, that failed badly.

https://www.amazon.com/Parallel-Distributed-Processing-Explorations-Microstructure/dp/0262181231

The Math department did leading edge work on Expert Systems and AI,

including products like ECLPS, a Rule-based tool I helped author.

Axiom's computer algebra was considered AI until it worked :-)

I don't know where anyone has the freedom to work on ideas that

don't make money this week or next. Some ideas take a long time

to develop and usually have nothing to do with the day job. IBM

Research was that kind of place.

While research was led by Ralph Gomory this was encouraged.

Apple, Microsoft, etc. need someone with vision to run a world

class lab that loses them money in the short term but changes

the world in the long term in areas unrelated to this week's

"business direction". Vision costs time and money but mostly

it requires someone unique to lead, like Gomory. When was the

last time Apple introduced an idea like a scanning-tunneling

microscope?

Once Gerstner (cookie monster) arrived the labs suffered badly.

Gerstner said "the last thing IBM needs right now is a vision".

It was amusing being laid off while the manager had a plaque on

his desk with "IBM Principles" including "full employment"

which was true all the way back to the depression. I guess the new

Gerstner plaques surrounded that with <sarcasm> tags :-)

Tim

[Nick Briggs]

We have an odd overlap -- I was doing the software for the hardware that imaged rewriteable paper at PARC, which was UV writable and heat eraseable - I don't know what the technology in the paper was.  It gave you a purplish-black output.  The image faded in about 24h even if you didn't heat it.  We used it mostly for separator sheets, the resolution on the UV write bar was lower than the 600 dpi that you got through the laser printing, though it was certainly readable for text (e.g., managers who printed their e-mail).