Lisp History Museum

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Tim Daly

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Jan 30, 2025, 4:51:25 PMJan 30
to Paul McJones, Tim Daly, Scott E. Fahlman, Medley Interlisp core
Paul,

I've run across another pile of Lisp related material. For example

Source code for Spice Lisp with credits by Rob MacLachlan, Scott Wholey,
Jim Large, Joe Grinder, Scott Fahlman, Walter van Roggen with a public domain
license. My sources are both paper and 5 1/4 inch floppies.

Internal implementation notes for LISP F1: A FORTRAN Implementation
of Lisp 1.5 by Mats Nordstrom, Erik Sandewall, and Diz Breslaw

A paper copy of a LISP Compiler by Richard Hart in 1973-75

A pile of manuals for CMU MACH / COMMON LISP for the IBM/RT

MACH/COMMON LISP release notes from 1989 by Chiles and McDonald

CMU Common Lisp User's Manual for MACH/IBM RT PC by McDonald in 1987
as a "Companion to Common Lisp: The Language"

A Hemlock User's Manual 1987 by MacLachlan. Hemlock is a CL text editor

A paper listing of LISP/VM source code from 1986

The Interlisp Virtual Machine Specification by J Strother Moore II from 1979

The Definition Of LISP 1.8+0.3i by Fred Blair which is an SECD definition from 1979

 An X3J13 Error Proposal by Kent Pitman from1986

A poem by Guy Sreele called Lambda Bound 1974

The Standard Lisp Technical Report UUCS-78-101 by Marti, Hearn, Griss, and Griss 1978

TLISP A Transportable-Lisp Implemented in PCODE UUCS-79-110 by Griss, Kessler,
and Maguire 1979

Source Code for Portable Common Loops from Xerox Parc referencing the 3600 1986

LISP Assembler Program: Reference Manual (LAP for LISP/VM) by Cyril Alberga 1986

Source code for FRANZ LISP 1981

Paul McJones

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Jan 30, 2025, 6:31:43 PMJan 30
to Tim Daly, Scott E. Fahlman, Medley Interlisp core
Tim,

This is a very interesting set of materials, with very little overlap from other sources. See below for specific comments:

On Jan 30, 2025, at 1:51 PM, Tim Daly <axio...@gmail.com> wrote:

Paul,

I've run across another pile of Lisp related material. For example

Source code for Spice Lisp with credits by Rob MacLachlan, Scott Wholey,
Jim Large, Joe Grinder, Scott Fahlman, Walter van Roggen with a public domain
license. My sources are both paper and 5 1/4 inch floppies.

We now have an online copy (see https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/cmu/Spice_Lisp.tar.gz); perhaps you could compare your listing with it?

Internal implementation notes for LISP F1: A FORTRAN Implementation
of Lisp 1.5 by Mats Nordstrom, Erik Sandewall, and Diz Breslaw

Nice, complementing the listing you previously donated.

A paper copy of a LISP Compiler by Richard Hart in 1973-75

Nice. Here’s a paper by Hart mentioning a system based on “Waterloo Lisp” for the IBM 360/65: https://www.ijcai.org/Proceedings/75/Papers/058.pdf

A pile of manuals for CMU MACH / COMMON LISP for the IBM/RT

MACH/COMMON LISP release notes from 1989 by Chiles and McDonald

CMU Common Lisp User's Manual for MACH/IBM RT PC by McDonald in 1987
as a "Companion to Common Lisp: The Language"

A Hemlock User's Manual 1987 by MacLachlan. Hemlock is a CL text editor

Are these three the whole pile, or are there more? It looks like no overlap with https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/common_lisp_family/#CMUCL_

A paper listing of LISP/VM source code from 1986

Nice — we have various documents, but no source code.

The Interlisp Virtual Machine Specification by J Strother Moore II from 1979

Nice; Moore has a not-great scan of it here: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~moore/publications/interlisp-vm.pdf

The Definition Of LISP 1.8+0.3i by Fred Blair which is an SECD definition from 1979

We have Stoyan’s photocopy of a draft dated September 18, 1979 — see https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/ibm/Blair-Definition_of_LISP1_8_0_3i-1979.pdf

 An X3J13 Error Proposal by Kent Pitman from1986


A poem by Guy Sreele called Lambda Bound 1974

Cool! It looks like it even got published: https://dl.acm.org/action/showBmPdf?doi=10.1145/1317224

The Standard Lisp Technical Report UUCS-78-101 by Marti, Hearn, Griss, and Griss 1978

Nice.

TLISP A Transportable-Lisp Implemented in PCODE UUCS-79-110 by Griss, Kessler,
and Maguire 1979

Nice.

Source Code for Portable Common Loops from Xerox Parc referencing the 3600 1986

Nice — it sounds like this is an earlier version of this: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/lang/lisp/oop/clos/pcl/0.html .

LISP Assembler Program: Reference Manual (LAP for LISP/VM) by Cyril Alberga 1986

Nice.

Source code for FRANZ LISP 1981

Very nice. Do you know the “Opus” number? 38.92 from about 1984 is available from Fateman and 38.93b is available from the CMU AI Repository, so a 1981 version is much earlier.

How would you like to proceed, Tim?


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Arun Welch

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Jan 30, 2025, 6:36:50 PMJan 30
to Paul McJones, Tim Daly, Scott E. Fahlman, Medley Interlisp core

Paul McJones

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Jan 30, 2025, 6:50:08 PMJan 30
to Arun Welch, Tim Daly, Scott E. Fahlman, Medley Interlisp core
Hmm — two problems there:
1. Mostly “current” stuff rather than the cool early stuff I’m always in search for.
2. Most of the URLs seem to be broken. But there do appear to be a bunch here:

https://kilthub.cmu.edu/search?q=CMU+common+Lisp+

CHM like having hard copies for their archive.


Paul

Tim Daly

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Jan 30, 2025, 6:54:43 PMJan 30
to Paul McJones, Scott E. Fahlman, Medley Interlisp core
Sorry, found another one

Cloe Reference Manual, Symbolics Corp. 1988

I have several huge piles of binders stacked in my library that I've been
ignoring for years. I've recently installed a lot of bookshelves and have been
sorting, cataloging, and trying to organize my books (about 7000) so the piles
of technical papers and binders have been ignored up until now. I hope this
is the last but there are several stacks to go. My apologies.



Tim Daly

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Jan 30, 2025, 7:15:42 PMJan 30
to Paul McJones, Scott E. Fahlman, Medley Interlisp core
> Are these three the whole pile, or are there more?

There might be more as the spelunking continues. I am about 1/2 way through the piles.
I will try to minimize the noise so if there is more I'll wait until I get done the search.

I am a packrat by nature so I have a lot of historical documents on various
pieces of research where I've been involved, some of which seem to have
risen from the grave (robots, neural nets, malware, proofs, computer algebra, etc.)
Nobody much cares about Hopfield networks these days. Although my work on
slip sensors and other skin sensors for robots might be coming of age. :-)

> How would you like to proceed, Tim?

As before I'm willing to send you anything that might be of interest.
I will compare my SPICE listing against the one you mention and get back to you.

I'm unaware of the Franz "Opus number". I'll look at the listing but it might be prior to the numbering.


On Thu, Jan 30, 2025 at 6:31 PM Paul McJones <pa...@mcjones.org> wrote:

Paul McJones

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Jan 30, 2025, 7:26:12 PMJan 30
to Arun Welch, Tim Daly, Scott E. Fahlman, Medley Interlisp core
Hmm — two problems there:
1. Mostly “current” stuff rather than the cool early stuff I’m always in search for.
2. Most of the URLs seem to be broken. But there do appear to be a bunch here:

https://kilthub.cmu.edu/search?q=CMU+common+Lisp+

CHM like having hard copies for their archive.

But I like links to online resources, so I just added 4 to https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/common_lisp_family/#CMUCL_ — thanks, Arun!


Paul

Tim Daly

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Jan 30, 2025, 7:37:05 PMJan 30
to Paul McJones, Arun Welch, Scott E. Fahlman, Medley Interlisp core
I paged through the Franz listing. There was nothing that resembled an "Opus number".
Fanfold paper is not the easiest source to search so I might have missed it but I doubt it.

Paul McJones

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Jan 30, 2025, 7:38:41 PMJan 30
to Tim Daly, Arun Welch, Scott E. Fahlman, Medley Interlisp core
Thanks for looking; in any case, the 1981 date makes it special.

Nick Briggs

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Jan 30, 2025, 11:53:21 PMJan 30
to Tim Daly, Paul McJones, Scott E. Fahlman, Lisp Core

Tim Daly

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Jan 31, 2025, 12:58:45 PMJan 31
to Nick Briggs, Paul McJones, Scott E. Fahlman, Lisp Core

John Cowan

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Feb 1, 2025, 8:32:02 AMFeb 1
to Tim Daly, Paul McJones, Scott E. Fahlman, Medley Interlisp core
"Lambda Bound" and much other random lossage by The Great Quux can be found at https://www.ultimate.com/phil/pdp10/quux.poem.  Although Steele is an East Coast Lisper, there are several references to Interlisp, including "BBN Superlisp" and "A Time For DWIM". There's also a double-dactyl: search locally for "[c]".



John Cowan

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Feb 1, 2025, 9:05:26 AMFeb 1
to Nick Briggs, Tim Daly, Paul McJones, Scott E. Fahlman, Lisp Core
I updated this in 1995 as "Alice's USENET Flame", currently at https://sattlers.org/mickey/culture/humor/items/Geekish/alicesUsenetFlame.html. The Lisp and MIT references have been replaced by Unix ones, though it needs to be updated again.

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Tim Daly

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May 19, 2025, 11:55:19 PMMay 19
to Paul McJones, Arun Welch, Scott E. Fahlman, Medley Interlisp core
I've taken an interest in testing GCL against Paul Dietz's ANSI common lisp test suite.
In fact, I'm likely to enhance it with my own set of tests.
While doing that it seems that parallel tests of interlisp would be of interest.
Is there a published common lisp document for interlisp?

Tim

Paolo Amoroso

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May 20, 2025, 2:30:42 AMMay 20
to Tim Daly, Paul McJones, Arun Welch, Scott E. Fahlman, Medley Interlisp core
The release notes of Medley and a few earlier versions of Interlisp-D discuss the implementation and enhancements of Xerox Common Lisp. I'm not aware of other Common Lisp documents for Interlisp.

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Arun Welch

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May 20, 2025, 10:40:49 AMMay 20
to Paolo Amoroso, Tim Daly, Paul McJones, Scott E. Fahlman, Medley Interlisp core
There’s also the XCL Implementation Notes, which was issued along with the Lyric release: https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_xeroxinter2464LyricCommonLispImplementationNotesJu_3467898/page/n79/mode/2up

Arun Welch

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May 20, 2025, 12:00:47 PMMay 20
to Paolo Amoroso, Tim Daly, Paul McJones, Scott E. Fahlman, Medley Interlisp core
I found my physical copy, if anyone wants it let me know and provide an address for me to mail it to you.
> To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/lispcore/C66DDEDB-FB0C-4523-AC5E-DEB05053ABF4%40anzus.com.


Larry Masinter

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May 26, 2025, 11:59:36 PMMay 26
to Arun Welch, Paolo Amoroso, Tim Daly, Paul McJones, Scott E. Fahlman, Medley Interlisp core

~/il/medley$ grep -ilr "common.*lisp.*implementation.*notes"
lispusers/TRANSOR-TO-COMMONLISP.XFORMS
docs/Sun Users Guide/1-INTRODUCTION.TEDIT
docs/Sun Users Guide/004-PREFACE.TEDIT
docs/internal/ImplManual.TEdit
docs/ReleaseNote/PREFACE.TEDIT
docs/ReleaseNote/SEC5-LIBRARY-MODULES.TEDIT
docs/ReleaseNote/SEC3-IRMFEATURES-I.TEDIT
docs/ReleaseNote/APPENDIXE-ERRSYS.TEDIT
docs/ReleaseNote/SEC3-IRMFEATURES-II.TEDIT
docs/ReleaseNote/SEC7-CLIMPLMNTN.TEDIT
docs/ReleaseNote/APPENDIXA-THEEXEC.TEDIT
docs/ReleaseNote/TABSINFOP.SKETCH
docs/html-primer/Medley-Primer-OnePage_files/content.htm
docs/html-sunguide/Sun-Users-Guide_files/content.htm
library/000docs/005-INTRO.TEDIT
library/000docs/004-PREFACE.TEDIT




Larry Masinter

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May 28, 2025, 6:10:03 PMMay 28
to Tim Daly, Paul McJones, Arun Welch, Scott E. Fahlman, Medley Interlisp core
I should have mentioned that there is a separate Interlisp/test repository which contains a directory of several different test suites. I spent only a few hours trying to sort out the tests and put it aside.   I'd be happy to go through the test repository with you and see what we can figure out.

I think there 


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