[seanmcdirmid]

I don't believe Lisp was even viable without garbage collections given that lists are created and shared left and right, not to mention closures. Sure, McCarthy could have used "malloc," but making the right "free" calls would have been impossible.

Garbage collection is the main reason why lambdas were slow to be added to C++, as the objects they close over have indefinite lifetimes.

> Because if it didn't (UNIX wasn't invented until 1969 either) it would make sense for memory to be available for a single process. And it would mean when people said garbage collection they were envisioning malloc/free.

This doesn't make any sense, sorry. Manual memory management works well when objects have definite lifetimes, and fails miserably when they don't.