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 collapsevault://ai-winter— AI winter: the full historical pattern of hype, funding, and disillusionmentvault://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://ai-winters-1980s— the 1980s winters in sequence, with the one first-hand note in the clustervault://ai-hype-comparison— the 1980s expert-system boom set against the current LLM wavevault://lisp-machine— Lisp machines: Symbolics, Xerox Dandelion, Interlisp-D — the hardware world it all ran onvault://lisp-machine-successors— what became of the Lisp machine lineage, including emulation
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 wintervault://context-consilium— the Consilium era: Motif TTY driver, Smalltalk prototype, Staff Engineer workvault://winterp— WINTERP itself: the OSF/Motif Widget INTERPreter by Niels Mayervault://netscape-communicator— Netscape Communicator 4.x: the XFE team, HTML sig invention, Firefox creditsvault://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
Formation & Personal Threads — the non-career material: what was read, collected, and looked at, and why it turns out to be the same fascination as the rest.
vault://vor-blish— VOR (James Blish, 1958): the Avon paperback that starts the biographyvault://pleiades— the Pleiades (M45): favorite sky object, emergent complexity at 440 light-years, first destination in Elite Dangerousvault://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
| slug | image_url |
|---|---|
| pleiades | m45.webp |
| tsundoku | drgxx.jpg |
| vor-blish | cover-front.jpg |
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
- pleiades — The Pleiades — Richard's favorite sky object. A 100-million-year-old cluster still wrapped in the cloud it formed from, an emergent-complexity object in the sky, and the first destination he plotted in Elite Dangerous.
- 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