The first
CEO was
Tony Slocum, formerly of
IntelliCorp; and Gabriel was Lucid's Chief Technical Officer (CTO) and first president.
Initial success The product the company ultimately shipped was an integrated Lisp
IDE for
Sun Microsystems'
RISC hardware architecture—this sidestepped the principal failure of
Lisp machines by in essence rewriting a lesser version of the Lisp machine IDE for use on a more cost-effective and less moribund architecture. In 1987, Gabriel resigned as President, but remained its CTO.
Decline Eventually Lucid's focus shifted (during the
AI Winter) from the Lisp market (which was still growing at this time) to an
object-oriented IDE for
C++ called "Energize". A core component of the IDE was
Richard Stallman's version of
Emacs,
GNU Emacs. GNU Emacs was not suitable for Lucid's needs, however, and several Lucid programmers (including
Jamie W. Zawinski) were assigned to help develop GNU Emacs to meet those needs. Friction arose between the programmers and Stallman, and Lucid forked the software—thus they were primarily responsible for the birth of
XEmacs. By 1994, Lucid's attempts to reinvent itself as a C++ company, and its neglect of its still profitable Lisp sideline had ended in failure, and the company's revenues fell to levels which could not sustain it. Lucid Incorporated went
bankrupt. The rights to Lucid Common Lisp were sold to
Harlequin Ltd. which was bought in 1999 by
Global Graphics; Global Graphics then sold the rights to
Xanalys Corporation, which spun off
LispWorks, the current rights holder which sells Lucid Common Lisp under the "Liquid Common Lisp" label. ==References==