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A comment on 'Fifth Generation' Became Japan's Lost Generation (1992). Parent comment

Re:'Fifth Generation' Became Japan's Lost Generation (1992) by ghaff on Tuesday March 20, 2018 @07:41PM (#16633876)
At the time, there were a lot of voices pushing the idea that public-private partnerships in the Japanese MITI vein were the future. Economists like Lester Thurow vehemently argued that the US wasn't doing nearly enough in this vein and was going to lose out to Japan as a result.

The history of AI research is sort of messy but around the end of the 1980s you were entering one of the AI winters. As you say, a lot of money had been pumped into expert systems without a lot of commercial success (and some high-profile failures). The Lisp machine market was collapsing. It probably didn't help that a lot of the big computer companies at the time (the Route 128 minicomputer makers) were collectively struggling.

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Re:'Fifth Generation' Became Japan's Lost Generation (1992) by geophile on Wednesday March 21, 2018 @12:39AM (#16635506)
The research arm of CCA disappeared in 1988, at the same time that Symbolics (and other Lisp machine companies) was failing. So I, along with a few Symbolics people, were looking for the next thing to do, as OO databases were becoming a thing. We were brought together by an entrepreneur and formed Object Design, one of the batch of OO database companies of the late 80s/early 90s. Those Symbolics guys were absolutely brilliant.
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Re:'Fifth Generation' Became Japan's Lost Generation (1992) by ScottBurson on Wednesday March 21, 2018 @01:04AM (#16635626)
I remember ObjectStore. Tried to use it, but it didn't work that well for our use case; we were better off doing serialization. Very interesting design, though.
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Re:'Fifth Generation' Became Japan's Lost Generation (1992) by lispm on Wednesday March 21, 2018 @03:55AM (#16636282)
Notable is also that Lucid's Energize C++ programming environment used Objectstore, too. Lucid was known for its excellent Common Lisp implementation.
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