About the Vault

The vault is the archival layer of this MCP server — primary sources, historical context, and career background that inform the curated content in profile://. Where profile://biography tells the story, the vault provides the receipts.

What's Here

AI History — the first commercial AI wave and its collapse: the expert systems boom, the Lisp machine ecosystem, and the funding collapse that ended it all. Richard was writing knowledge bases at Teknowledge when it happened.

• vault://teknowledge — Teknowledge Corporation: co-founders, products, Richard's role, and the collapse
• vault://ai-winter — AI winter: the full historical pattern of hype, funding, and disillusionment
• vault://ai-boom-1980s-mcintosh — the 1980s AI boom in depth (Brewminate / Matthew McIntosh)
• vault://ai-winter-medium-rothwell — the second AI winter examined (Medium / Jamieson Rothwell)
• vault://lisp-machine — Lisp machines: Symbolics, Xerox Dandelion, Interlisp-D — the hardware world it all ran on

Career Context — the eras and tools that shaped Richard's approach to UI and systems:

• vault://context-winterp-era — the WINTERP era: GUI prototyping with OSF/Motif after the AI winter
• vault://context-consilium — the Consilium era: Motif TTY driver, Smalltalk prototype, Staff Engineer work
• vault://winterp — WINTERP itself: the OSF/Motif Widget INTERPreter by Niels Mayer
• vault://netscape-communicator — Netscape Communicator 4.x: the XFE team, HTML sig invention, Firefox credits
• vault://taligent — Taligent: the Apple/IBM joint venture that never shipped

Technical Lineage:

• vault://spec-lineage — the declarative pattern connecting 1985 knowledge engineering to 2026 YAML-driven UI; tacit knowledge made explicit

Language & Platform History:

• vault://smalltalk — Smalltalk: history, object model, live coding environment
• vault://tsundoku — the full collection: 2,743 Kindle books, 1,720 TTRPG PDFs, 667k+ concept art images, Syd Mead lithographs

Relationship to profile://

The vault complements profile://biography and profile://journey-programming — use it when you need deeper historical context than the curated content provides. Cross-references between vault entries and profile entries are in the related field of each document's frontmatter.

Image Map

Items

• ai-boom-1980s-mcintosh — Article: The AI Boom of the 1980s — expert systems, hype, and hardware dreams
• ai-hype-comparison — Side-by-side comparison of the 1980s expert systems hype cycle and the current LLM/GenAI wave — parallels, differences, and winter risk
• ai-winter-medium-rothwell — Article: When the Billion-Dollar AI Dream Became a $100,000 Paperweight — AI winter retrospective
• ai-winter — AI Winter — collapse of expert systems funding and industry contraction in the late 1980s
• ai-winters-1980s — Detailed anatomy of the 1980s expert systems boom and the second AI winter — causes, timeline, and personal connection
• context-consilium — Personal context: Richard Hess at Consilium — Motif, Smalltalk, and WINTERP era
• context-winterp-era — Personal context: Richard Hess during the WINTERP era — Lisp, Motif, and X11
• lisp-machine-successors — What came after Lisp machines — software ports, revival attempts, spiritual successors, and the GPU parallel
• lisp-machine — Lisp Machine — dedicated hardware for Lisp execution, Xerox and Symbolics history
• netscape-communicator — Netscape Communicator 4.x — Richard Hess's role and the browser's technical context
• smalltalk — Smalltalk — object-oriented programming language history, Xerox PARC origins
• spec-lineage — The unbroken thread from 1985 knowledge engineering to 2026 YAML-driven UI — same architecture, different substrate; tacit knowledge made explicit
• taligent — Taligent — Apple/IBM joint venture for object-oriented OS (1992–1998)
• teknowledge — Teknowledge Corporation — expert systems company where Richard Hess worked in the AI boom era
• tsundoku — Tsundoku — Richard Hess's 2026 collection overview: Kindle, TTRPG PDFs, concept art
• vor-blish — VOR by James Blish — the Avon paperback that started everything. A living nuclear reactor crash-lands on Earth. First contact as incomprehensibility, not invasion.
• winterp — WINTERP — OSF/Motif Widget INTERPreter, Niels Mayer's Lisp/Motif rapid prototyping toolkit