The Lisp Machine Wars: How a Lab Feud Sparked the Free Software Movement
Most corporate rivalries are forgotten within a decade. The split that tore apart MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the early 1980s is different, because one of its casualties walked away so disillusioned that he launched a movement which now underpins much of the modern software world. The "Lisp Machine wars" were never literal warfare — calling them that oversells it — but the bitterness was real, the stakes felt enormous to the people inside, and the fallout reshaped computing in ways nobody at the time intended.
