The software bundle was later renamed ZetaLisp, to distinguish the Symbolics ' product from other vendors who had also licensed the MIT software.

Richard Stallman's account claims Symbolics engaged in a business tactic in which it forced MIT to make all fixes and improvements to the Lisp Machine OS available only to it, and thereby choke off its competitor LMI, which at that time had insufficient resources to independently maintain or develop the OS and environment.

Symbolics felt that they no longer had sufficient control over their product.

It is essentially a fork of an earlier operating system originating on the MIT AI Lab's Lisp machines which Symbolics had used in common with LMI and Texas Instruments.

At MIT Macsyma had a link to the IMSL ( now Rogue Wave Software ) numerical libraries, but this link was severed when Macsyma moved to Symbolics.

( Earlier, Symbolics had killed its own project to build a Lisp compiler for standard computers to avoid competing with Lisp machine sales.

Macsyma, Inc., was founded in 1992 by Russell Noftsker ( chairman, who had co-founded Symbolics ) and Richard Petti ( president, who had turned around Macsyma for a time at Symbolics ) by raising funds and purchasing the rights to Macsyma from the ailing Symbolics.

In 1999, Macsyma were acquired by Tenedos LLC, a holding company that previously had purchased Symbolics.

Many of the newly hired American Lisp staff had previously worked for Lucid Inc. and Symbolics, other Lisp companies which had previously failed.

He combined it with a small company which he had formed around an earlier Symbolics spin off Macsyma which was selling mathematical software.

While both companies delivered proprietary software, Richard Stallman believed that LMI, unlike Symbolics, had tried to avoid hurting the lab.

Symbolics had been hindered by Noftsker's promise to give Greenblatt a year's head start, and by severe delays in procuring venture capital.

Symbolics still had the major advantage that while 3 or 4 of the AI Lab hackers had gone to work for Greenblatt, a solid 14 other hackers had signed onto Symbolics.

The other was Lisp Machines, Inc., although Symbolics attracted most of the hackers, and more funding.

Symbolics Common Lisp provides most of the Common Lisp standard with a huge number of extensions ( many of those coming from ZetaLisp ).

Symbolics hired most of the lab hackers, and a schism was created between the two groups of hackers, to the point where some would not even talk to each other.

Symbolics was a spinoff from the MIT AI Lab, one of two companies to be founded by AI Lab staffers and associated hackers for the purpose of manufacturing Lisp machines.

Symbolics ' initial product, the LM-2 ( introduced in 1981 ), was a repackaged version of the MIT CADR Lisp machine design.

The Lisp Machine system software was then copyrighted by MIT, and was licensed to Symbolics.

At that point, Symbolics began using their own copy of the software, located on their company servers — while Stallman says that Symbolics did that to prevent its Lisp improvements from flowing to Lisp Machines, Inc. From that base, Symbolics made extensive improvements to every part of the software, and continued to deliver almost all the source code to their customers ( including MIT ).

However, the policy prohibited MIT staff from distributing the Symbolics version of the software to others.

Symbolics developed Genera based on this foundation of the MIT Lisp machine operating system.

Symbolics improved the operating system software from the original MIT Lisp Machine and expanded it.

Symbolics, a maker of the Lisp machines, licensed the MIT Chaosnet hardware and software implementation from the CADR computer design.

*-Meta key, found on MIT, Symbolics, and Sun Microsystems keyboards

In early 1982, Macsyma was licensed by MIT to Arthur D. Little, Inc., which became the broker for Macsyma and soon licensed Macsyma to Symbolics in late 1982.

After working for Hewlett Packard Research Labs in Palo Alto and Symbolics, he became a founder of ICAD, Inc. Greenspun returned to MIT to study electrical engineering and computer science, eventually receiving a Ph. D.

Zmacs was written for the MIT Lisp machine and runs on its descendants ( Symbolics Genera, LMI Lambda, TI Explorer ).

Computers with 36-bit words included the MIT Lincoln Laboratory TX-2, the IBM 701 / 704 / 709 / 7090 / 7094, the UNIVAC 1103 / 1103A / 1105 / 1100 / 2200, the General Electric GE-600 / Honeywell 6000, the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-6 / PDP-10 ( as used in the DECsystem-10 / DECSYSTEM-20 ), and the Symbolics 3600 series.

He bargained with Patrick Winston that, in exchange for allowing Symbolics ' staff to keep working out of MIT, Symbolics would let MIT use internally and freely all the software Symbolics developed.

Noftsker formed Symbolics with Robert Adams and a number of AI Lab hackers, taking on the role of president and chairman ; Greenblatt would eventually start Lisp Machines Inc.

* 1983 Tom Kiely is named president of a new BBDO division called the " BBDO Business-to-Business Group " to service the broad range of communications needs required by its BtoB-oriented clients, including The Timken Company, Hammermill Paper, certain General Electric Company departments and of Symbolics, Inc, ( a so-called Artificial Intelligence computer manufacturer ).

Early pioneers of the Spanish Hustle, were dancers from the Latin Symbolics Dance Company, founded by George Vascones, who also served as President until his death in 1993.

It was at the Latin Symbolics Studio where Tony Manero who John Travolta played in the movie Saturday Night Fever, was taught to do the original Spanish Hustle, by the Latin Symbolics Dance Team, for a special showcase Tony was going to be doing in Las Vegas in 1977 after gaining popularity after the release of Saturday Night Fever.

Russell Noftsker is an American entrepreneur who notably founded Symbolics, and was its first chairman and president.

The first 4 man Rock Routine was choreographed by Willie ( Marine Boy ) Estrada from the South Bronx who was the leader of the Latin Symbolics Rock Team who were called The Rock Masters in the mid 1970s.

Symbolics then developed a radically new windowing system named Dynamic Windows with a presentation-based user interface.

e. g. on the Lisp Machine and then at Symbolics with the Genera ( operating system )

Nofstker was forced out of Symbolics completely by the board in 1988 after an internal battle with the then CEO Brian Sear.

In 1990 Petti left Symbolics for a start-up.

The AI Lab led to the invention of Lisp machines and their attempted commercialization by two companies in the 1980s: Symbolics and Lisp Machines Inc.

Symbolics forced Greenblatt to also resign at the AI lab, by citing MIT policies.

So for two years at the MIT AI Lab, from 1982 to the end of 1983, Stallman singlehandedly duplicated the efforts of the Symbolics programmers, in order to prevent them from gaining a monopoly on the lab's computers.