Why didnt PROSE survive?
PROSE was not portable. It was developed before Unix. About 25% of its code was assembly language, and it was implemented on proprietary operating systems that did not survive the time-sharing market. As the time-sharing vendors went out of business, PROSEs direct access to end-users was vastly curtailed, and IT procurers tended to bar its entry into their controlled end-user domains. It continued to be used on old machines for almost a decade, but at exorbitant prices. The infrastructure plunge of micro-computing in the 1980s made meta-calculus infeasible for more than a decade.
