[simonbrooke]

Objections:

1. the Xerox Lisp machines all used highly configurable processors which ran Lisp microcode, right back from the Alto; and by the time they got to the 1186 Daybreak it was a single chip, so a microprocessor. So to say they didn't have a Lisp microprocessor is sort of a misunderstanding. Although it's fair to say that memory was limited, and that performance was not on a par with the Symbolics or TI machines.

2. Common Lisp was very different from Interlisp, but that wasn't driven by customers.

It's worth reading Gabriel and Steele's 'The Evolution of Lisp'; neither author can be described as an Interlisp advocate, although the paper is reasonably fair. Full disclosure, I played a minor part in the European Lisp standardisation committees (under ISO WG 16) in the mid eighties, so I'm not an unbiased observer either. The conflict between European and US groups is documented (from a US perspective) in section 2.12.11 of the paper.

But essentially, I think I can say uncontroversially, the ascent of Common Lisp was highly political, and most certainly not customer driven.

Larry Massinter (et al)'s work to get Interlisp going on stock hardware is indeed a very welcome thing, but we've lost thirty years of evolution and development. Until it can address the host operating system's windowing layer, rather than running in a single window, it will remain a curiosity.

[pamoroso]

> Until it can address the host operating system's windowing layer, rather than running in a single window, it will remain a curiosity.

You're right in general. But having Medley's quirky window system and environment run in its own space is among the things I find fascinating of Medley. It's like an alien computing universe.

[lispm]

In former times that was the screen in front of you. With its own window manager, menus, scrolling, mouse controls, etc.

If one looks at current development environments, many of them have their own single window (with multiple subpanes and window layouts) and often a not-so-native user experience. Many cross-platform toolkits also add an additional layer. What is different here, is that the window is a new window system, where we often find in modern IDEs the IDE of subpanes, instead of subwindows/...

The Symbolics Genera UI OTOH favors multiple (mostly) full screen applications with subpanes. One switches between them via keyboard commands: select-e is the editor, select-l the listener, select-d the documentation reader, select-m the mailer, ... you get the idea.

[lispm]

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/6085/daybreak/Daybreak_Te...

"The central processor is a microprogrammed, 16-bit general purpose computer consisting of approximately 170 ICs of various sizes and complexity. It resides on a 10.9-inch by 16-inch printed wiring board assembly (PWBA), referred to as the Mesa Processor Board (MPB), located in slot 3 of the backplane."

"Four 2901C LSI chips that make up the core of the central processor. The 2901C is a 4-bit processor; the four chips are cascaded to provide a 16-bit processor. Supporting the 2901C are four register sets (U, RH, IB, and Link), a four-bit rotator, and four emulator registers (stackP, ibPtr, pe16, and MInt)."

Symbolics and TI had a more advanced processors: The Symbolics Ivory is a 40+8 bit specialized microprocessor. The TI MegaChip was a 32bit microprocessor for Lisp, also marketed as the first microprocessor with around 1 M transistors.

Both companies had developed chip design software in Lisp to create these microprocessors.

> But essentially, I think I can say uncontroversially, the ascent of Common Lisp was highly political, and most certainly not customer driven.

DARPA was the biggest "customer" and asked for a unified Lisp when delivering military applications. At that time many applications came with its own customized Lisp dialect. That was the reason why they invested so much money into a Common Lisp definition and later in the standard. They also invested probably close to a billion USD into hard and software projects. In the early days a research project could ask for money and when they did it in Lisp, they got a Lisp Machine for free (funded by DARPA, like the rest of the project).

"In April 1981, after a DARPA-sponsored meeting concerning the splintered Lisp community, Symbolics, the SPICE project, the NIL project, and the S-1 Lisp project joined together to define Common Lisp. "

> Until it can address the host operating system's windowing layer, rather than running in a single window, it will remain a curiosity.

In Symbolics Genera one can open multiple X11 windows and for example allocate specific activities (applications) to them. A TI explorer had a port of the interface designer, where one could interactively design Macintosh windows with the logic on the Lisp machine.

Action!, the worlds first dynamic interface builder - 1988

https://vimeo.com/62618532

The software was written in Common Lisp and ran on an embedded TI MicroExplorer Lisp Machine inside a Mac II.