Paul Graham was responsible for ACL's simple-streams, according to Duane Rettig of Franz:
Posted by jjwiseman at August 01, 2006 04:17 PM> 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 ...