Paul Graham was responsible for ACL's simple-streams, according to Duane Rettig of Franz:

> He stated that he tried (in vain) to get a commercial version (up 
> front for $0 with pay off on the backend), but was unable to cut such 
> a deal at the time and was thus (more or less) forced into using CLisp 
> (possibly because it was faster at startup and such than CMUCL, and 
> starting up fresh copies for each access was part of the MO of the 
> architecture).  He definitely tried to get Franz to cut a deal, but 
> could not get it done.  Franz (in the persons of those who made such 
> decisions), has subsequently said that was a (big) mistake.  Of 
> course, that is in hindsight, but I believe it has fed into their 
> business behavior in moving forward. 

The problem was not a business issue - we were more than willing to 
deal- it was a technical issue; we were one of the earliest 
implementors of Gray streams, and PG's requirements were for something 
much lighter weight.  So he went with Clisp, which had a more 
simplistic stream implementation.  It was that failure on our part 
which sent us back to the drawing board to reinvent our streams 
implementaiton, which in turn resulted in Simple-Streams.  Ironically, 
almost everybody has Gray streams now ...