I like the name; is it really a portmanteau of Prolog and the pronunciation of SQL?
Oh God I have enough homework.
We didnât have search or HTTP. Mosaic came out in '93. I remember having participated in a test concerning full-text queries for what was then called âInformation Retrievalâ on a text terminal. The best one could do was check trough the ETH library system ⊠I never found the good stuff in any case. 
As for the bathtub: Memoirs Found in a Bathtub:
Memoirs Found in a Bathtub is a science fiction novel by Polish writer StanisĆaw Lem, first published in 1961. It was first published in English in 1973; a second edition was published in 1986. Memoirs Found in a Bathtub starts with the finding of a diary in the distant future. The introduction dwells on the difficulties of historical research on the fictional âNeogene Eraâ, âthe period of the heyday of the pre-Chaotic culture, which preceded the Great Decompositionâ. âGreat Decompositionâ refers to the apocalyptic event of âpapyrolysisâ, decomposition of all paper on the planet in the pre-information-technology era, causing all records and money to turn into dustââthe end of the âepoch of papycracyâ.
Well it was just a joke. Seriousness kills life. Want me to change it?
Haha. One of my rooms looks like that, just minus the bathtub. The books are just piled there.
I will keep it next to the others I got back then. Here is one by Brigitte Hösli: â3-wertige Logiken und stabile Logik, July 1992 (#179)â. And by Oliver Lorenz âRetrieval von Grafikdokumenten, September 1992 (#182)â, basically a clumsy Google Image, running on a SparcStation. Beverly Sanders: âA Predicate Transformer Approach to Knowledge and Knowledge-based Protocols, September 1992 (#181)â Man, What happened.
My apologies for the joke in any case.
Thatâs pretty dark. But ⊠both are more or less the same (âmedian decedent age was 78 yearsâ) but I hear one may be at risk of a damaged lung at any age.
Now my interest in R has been reawakened.
Yes ETHZ had Modula/R for a brief time, and even a Modula-Prolog. But
Brigitte Hösli, Oliver Lorenz, Beverly Sanders, etc.. didnât belong to UBILAB
and the group that did ProQuel. The ProQuel group was quite innovative,
exploring FOL whenever possible, even resembling 2nd order MIL by
@stassa.p , in a query optimization system, using SICStus Prolog in 1992.
This was before leanTAP was published by Beckert & Posegga in 1995:
Negation inside normal form (nif) was used to reduce the number
of connectives and to be able to use simple one sided sequents. The
prover did not have some occurs check tricks up it sleves. The prover (*)
was special since it supported not only meta terms for exists but also
meta literals, but the learning elaboration was clumsy since freeze/2
was used. Meta literals had the syntax ?H. Since FOL was used one
could turn abduction into deduction via contraposition:
K, ?H |- E
Equivalent to, but the prover wouldnât care anyways due to nif:
K, ~E |- ~?H
Given 35 years gap and faster machines, maybe should repeat it?
Nowadays one would possibly try egraphs and kind of explore multiple
?H in parallel. But there is a little caveat, what about quantifiers?
(*) Work done by Diplomastudent Renaud Hirsch from Okt 91 to Feb 92.
The âMemoirs Found in a Bathtubâ moment starts here:
When we look where the 90âs took their inspiration
for backtracking based search via backward chaining. Mainly
from early attempts of resolution theorem proving
that were saturation based. So the same âinverse methodâ
which has a strategy neutral logical calculus kernel, is seen
in the handbook of automated theorem proving from an
egraph viewpoint we could say, when the authors write:
So the world constantly oscillates between Davis Putnam (1960)
mehods that use saturation, and Davis-Putnam-Logemann-Loveland
(1962) methods that use backtracking. StanisĆaw Lem, first published
his novel in 1961 and âMemoirs Found in a Bathtubâ mostlikely
refers to suicide. But Logic Programming has not yet commited
suicide, for example now there are combinations such as SLG Tabling,
which can be viewed as having saturation and backtracking.