Related to this: I was at UC Berkeley in the early 80's (and did the port of Vaxima (the VAX version of Macsyma, running on Franz Lisp) to the Motorola 68000). There was definitely a rivalry between UCB and Caltech in the symbolic algebra area, and I think the "100x slower" was just an excuse to do it differently. I don't think he would have wanted to appear to be following anyone at UCB.

Well, when "not invented here" is accompanied by "not invented anywhere else, either", we usually just call it "invented".

Agreed. I remember first reading an overview of Lisp [1], and my reaction was, "Ah, okay, just like they do in Mathematica ... ah, right, just like how Mathematica does that. Huh -- he must have done it in Lisp then."

After that, I didn't even suspect it didn't use Lisp until today.

[1] I think in Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas

>If that's not extreme NIH, I don't know what is.

Worked well for him though...

Absolutely; I'm not knocking his achievements. It's a rare intelligence who can work through NIH and succeed so well.