I was working at IBM in Boca Raton in 1990-91 when OS/2 was being developed. Wandering the hallways one afternoon, I passed by the OS/2 team where I overheard one engineer explaining to another engineer, "See, when you drag a file to the trash can, it should be a Move operation, not a Copy." I thought, OMG, this project is hosed. This was just a few months before it was supposed to be released.
The first release of OS/2 was a complete disaster. IBM was inundated with calls from customers who were having issues. They pulled every single person on the site into service as customer reps, without any training in OS/2! I was working on a UNIX project at the time and I was an Apple person - I had no clue how to help people with OS/2 or PCs but my manager did not like it when I tried to explain that. So I probably am listed somewhere as the worst OS/2 customer support person ever.
My wife worked at Boeing for seven years in the 1980s, in management. We tracked down her pension recently, hoping for a huge payout after it had been invested for 35 years. It turns out that she will get $96/month. We are very disappointed in the Boeing pension managers.
One comment from his thesis advisors on AM was that they couldn't tell which part was performed by AM and which part was guided by Lenat. I think that comment holds for both AM and EURISKO. In those days everyone wanted a standalone AI. Now, people realize that cooperative human-AI systems are acceptable and even preferable in many ways.
I'll make sure my profile has an email address. I'm very busy the next few months but keep pinging me to remind me to get these materials online.
Lenat was my assigned advisor when I started my Masters at Stanford. I met with him once and he gave me some advice on classes. After that he was extremely difficult to schedule a meeting with (for any student, not just me). He didn't get tenure and left to join MCC after that year. I don't think I ever talked to him again after the first meeting.
He was extremely smart, charismatic, and a bit arrogant (but a well-founded arrogance). From other comments it sounds like he was pleasant to young people at Cycorp. I think his peers found him more annoying.
His great accomplishments were having a multi-decade vision of how to build an AI and actually keeping the vision alive for so long. You have to be charismatic and convincing to do that.
In the mid-80s I took his thesis and tried to implement AM on a more modern framework, but the thesis lacked so many details about how it worked that I was unable to even get started implementing anything.
BTW, if there are any historians out there I have a copy of Lenat's thesis with some extra pages including emailed messages from his thesis advisors (Minsky, McCarthy, et al) commenting on his work. I also have a number of AI papers from the early 1980s that might not be generally available.
I once owned a 1.5 acre property that had approximately 1.4 acres of English ivy on it. It was horrible; the ivy is, by all practical means, impossible to kill. An area covered with a tarp for two months looks exactly like an uncovered area. The only way to get rid of it was to pull the roots out of the ground, mostly by hand. And it grows new roots every meter or so.
If you want to get rich, invent a way to kill ivy that does not also kill people.
I've been through changes like this several times and the SURE indicator that big changes are coming is when the higher-ups say "Nothing will change". Seriously.
I actually think that, below the CEO level, the managers are engaged in wishful thinking, rather than deceit.
The one thing that makes LISP great is the "functions are data" formulation.
Many of the "current best paradigms" of Computer Science are actually fads. LISP was a fad of the 1980s. Java was a fad of the 1990s. NoSQL databases are a current fad. It doesn't mean that one is better than another. It's human nature to think that new technology must be better than old technology. In fact, the programming environment on the LISP machines of the 1980s was far better than anything we had till the early 2000s, despite being "old".
The first release of OS/2 was a complete disaster. IBM was inundated with calls from customers who were having issues. They pulled every single person on the site into service as customer reps, without any training in OS/2! I was working on a UNIX project at the time and I was an Apple person - I had no clue how to help people with OS/2 or PCs but my manager did not like it when I tried to explain that. So I probably am listed somewhere as the worst OS/2 customer support person ever.