Explain what Venue was#263
Conversation
Signed-off-by: Paolo Amoroso <info@paoloamoroso.com>
FYI - here's what we say about Venue in the glossary:
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Anzus commented Jan 16, 2025
Venue wasn't a Xerox spin-off. Envos was the spin-off, which shuttered and then John formed Venue in order to keep supporting Medley. |
We may drop this explanation and defer to the glossary or rewrite it as "a company that maintained and commercialized Medley until the early 2000s". What do you think? |
A slightly shorter option is "a company that supported Medley until the early 2000s". |
I was thinking about this today. First off, I think the solution to this PR is to reference the glossary and not try to add a definition of Venue in the document. We should then work on cleaning up the entry in the glossary. That said, I was playing with Gemini using it as a chatbot to discuss Interlisp development and history. I asked it several questions about Venue, Envos and John Sybalsky. One question I asked was for a 2 sentence summary of Venue, the company. It gave me the following:
Which of course doesn't exactly line up what @Anzus said. I would tend to believe Arun over Gemini. I copied my complete conversation into a separate document, it's 9 pages, so a little long to add here. I would love for someone with direct knowledge to provide insight into how much is true and how much is fantasy, an AI hallucination. |
i'm afraid that the AIs i've seen are all form and no substance -- with no ability to distinguish facts. It's ALL hallucination, except when someone else has written down the facts in a way that the LLM can use. In this situation with Xerox and Venue and Fuji Xerox and SRI, I think we need to be careful not to not provide misleading assertions -- something that I think is highly likely when LLM-based "AI" is involved. Please don't use AI to generate text to use when describing legal relationships. |
Anzus commented Jan 20, 2025 via email
Yeah, pretty much everything in that document is wrong. This is my memory of things. By the time I got involved (~Carol release of Interlisp-D) Xerox AI Systems was the part of Xerox that sold Interlisp-D, 11xx workstations, and eventually Medley, based on the technology from PARC. i.e., If you paid for the product, that money went to XAIS. I don’t know what the contractual relationship was between PARC and XAIS. The customer relationship was with XAIS. I don’t know what happened prior to my involvement. I remember meeting Larry IRL at the XAIS booth at an AAAI or IJCAI, but Larry’s gonna have to tell you who paid for his plane fare :-). Xerox spun out that product to a company called Envos. Envos had two parts, one part was all the XAIS business line, and the other was chartered to develop a new product that would bring the Xerox-style programming to general-purpose workstations (Aria). When Envos folded Aria was kept alive until they released v1.0 and declared victory and disbanded. Envos folded. There were customers (in particular Fuji Xerox) who required ongoing support and continued development. John Sybalsky, who headed up the product side at Envos, formed a new company, wholly owned by himself, called Venue, to take over that support and development and continued sales of the product. I don’t think John had the ability to sell 11xx’s, but that was irrelevant by then anyway. … On Jan 19, 2025, at 3:39 PM, Larry Masinter ***@***.***> wrote: i'm afraid that the AIs i've seen are all form and no substance -- with no ability to distinguish facts. It's ALL hallucination, except when someone else has written down the facts in a way that the LLM can use. In this situation with Xerox and Venue and Fuji Xerox and SRI, I think we need to be careful not to not provide misleading assertions -- something that I think is highly likely when LLM-based "AI" is involved. Please don't use AI to generate text to use when describing legal relationships. https://larrymasinter.net/https://interlisp.org/ — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or unsubscribe. You are receiving this because you were mentioned.Message ID: ***@***.***> |
I agree to defer to the glossary for further information on Venue, so this PR may be dropped. |
If there are no objections I'll close this PR. |
Closing as unnecessary. |
The 2024 annual report aims in particular at people not familiar with the project or Medley who may not know Venue, mentioned in the report. So I added a short explanation.