why did these companies choose Tcl over Python

[Robin Becker]

Martin v. Löwis wrote:
.......
> I think this question needs to be answered on a case-by-case basis,
> but my guess is that it is in most cases historical. Work on Tcl
> started in 1988, and it was the first (major?) embeddable scripting
> language (that is also free software etc). Python wasn't released
> until 1991, and wasn't first recognized as being just as easily
> embeddable (and I think early releases weren't as easily embeddable
> as today's Python is).
......
in the 70's many of the people I knew in engineering were using forth as an 
embedded language. Of course the embedding was the final application as the 
controlling computers were really puny eg pdp8/9/11.

At that time the concept of free software hadn't even arisen. I believe forth 
was proprietary, but it was widely available to academics and many machine tools 
and similar control applications used it.
-- 
Robin Becker