Indeed, I realized I had my timeline a bit off after posting that. Of course, we have Lisp ca. 1960. (Pascal appeared 1970, but I don't think that's widely considered memory-safe. ML 1973, and that never got a widespread industry use.)

What I mean is: we had memory safe system-implementation languages in wide spread production use only after/around the times of the publication of that memo; importantly, Java.

We had memory-safe experimental programming languages, and scripting languages before that. And of course, around those times, hardware was fast enough that you could start implementing systems with scripting languages (Perl, Python, Ruby, JavaScript)

And the bit I want to correct is, of course, the point is if they are actually used. In that sense, I'd correct the introduction of Rust around 2023-2026 in actual, wide-spread use.