Interlisp (also seen with a variety of capitalizations) is a programming environment built around a version of the programming language Lisp. Interlisp development began in 1966 at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (renamed

BBN Technologies Raytheon BBN (originally Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc.) is an American research and development company, based next to Fresh Pond in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. In 1966, the Franklin Institute awarded the firm the Frank P. Brown ...

) in

Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston, ...

with Lisp implemented for the

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president unt ...

(DEC)

PDP-1 The PDP-1 (''Programmed Data Processor-1'') is the first computer in Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP series and was first produced in 1959. It is famous for being the computer most important in the creation of hacker culture at Massachusett ...

computer by Danny Bobrow and D. L. Murphy. In 1970, Alice K. Hartley implemented BBN LISP, which ran on

PDP-10 Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)'s PDP-10, later marketed as the DECsystem-10, is a mainframe computer family manufactured beginning in 1966 and discontinued in 1983. 1970s models and beyond were marketed under the DECsystem-10 name, especi ...

machines running the

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

TENEX (renamed

TOPS-20 The TOPS-20 operating system by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) is a proprietary OS used on some of DEC's 36-bit mainframe computers. The Hardware Reference Manual was described as for "DECsystem-10/DECSYSTEM-20 Processor" (meaning the DEC PDP- ...

). In 1973, when Danny Bobrow,

Warren Teitelman Warren Teitelman (1941 – August 12, 2013) was an American computer scientist known for his work on programming environments and the invention and first implementation of concepts including Undo, Undo / Redo, spelling correction, advising, online ...

and

Ronald Kaplan Ronald M. Kaplan (born 1946) has served as a Vice President at Amazon.com and Chief Scientist for Amazon Search ( A9.com). He was previously Vice President and Distinguished Scientist at Nuance Communications and director of Nuance' Natural Lan ...

moved from BBN to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center ( PARC), it was renamed Interlisp. Interlisp became a popular Lisp development tool for

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

(AI) researchers at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

and elsewhere in the

community A community is a social unit (a group of living things) with commonality such as place, norms, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, village, tow ...

of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (

DARPA The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adv ...

). Interlisp was notable for integrating interactive development tools into an

integrated development environment An integrated development environment (IDE) is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development. An IDE normally consists of at least a source code editor, build automation tools a ...

(IDE), such as a

debugger A debugger or debugging tool is a computer program used to test and debug other programs (the "target" program). The main use of a debugger is to run the target program under controlled conditions that permit the programmer to track its executi ...

, an automatic correction tool for simple errors (via do what I mean (

DWIM DWIM (do what I mean) computer systems attempt to anticipate what users intend to do, correcting trivial errors automatically rather than blindly executing users' explicit but potentially incorrect input. Software The term was coined by Warren Teit ...

) software design), and analysis tools.

Adaptations

At Xerox PARC, an early attempt was made to define a

virtual machine In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization/emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized hardw ...

to facilitate

porting In software engineering, porting is the process of adapting software for the purpose of achieving some form of execution in a computing environment that is different from the one that a given program (meant for such execution) was originally desi ...

, termed the ''Interlisp virtual machine''. However, it was not useful as a basis for porting.

Peter Deutsch Peter R. Deutsch (born April 1, 1957) is an American politician from the U.S. state of Florida. Deutsch was a Democratic Representative from Florida's 20th congressional district from 1993 until 2005. Background Deutsch was born in the boro ...

defined a byte-coded instruction set for Interlisp, and implemented it as a microcode emulator for the

Xerox Alto The Xerox Alto is a computer designed from its inception to support an operating system based on a graphical user interface (GUI), later using the desktop metaphor. The first machines were introduced on 1 March 1973, a decade before mass-market ...

. This was then ported to a series of workstation designs produced by

Xerox Xerox Holdings Corporation (; also known simply as Xerox) is an American corporation that sells print and electronic document, digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut (ha ...

for internal use and for commercial exploitation, including on the Xerox 1100 (Dolphin), 1108 (Dandelion), 1109 (the floating-point enabled Dandetiger), 1186 (Daybreak), and 1132 (Dorado). Interlisp implementations for these were known collectively as Interlisp-D. Commercially, these were sold as

Lisp machine Lisp machines are general-purpose computers designed to efficiently run Lisp as their main software and programming language, usually via hardware support. They are an example of a high-level language computer architecture, and in a sense, the ...

s and branded as Xerox AI Workstations when

Larry Masinter Larry Melvin Masinter is an early internet pioneer and ACM Fellow. After attending Stanford University, he became a Principal Scientist of Xerox Artificial Intelligence Systems and author or coauthor of 26 of the Internet Engineering Task Force's ...

was the chief scientist of that group. The same designs, but with different software, were also sold under different names (e.g., when running the Viewpoint system, the 1186 Daybreak was sold as the Xerox 6085.) Releases of Interlisp-D were named according to a musical theme, which ended with Koto, Lyric, and Medley. Later versions included an implementation of pre-

American National Standards Institute The American National Standards Institute (ANSI ) is a private non-profit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes, systems, and personnel in the United States. The organi ...

(ANSI)

Common Lisp Common Lisp (CL) is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in ANSI standard document ''ANSI INCITS 226-1994 (S20018)'' (formerly ''X3.226-1994 (R1999)''). The Common Lisp HyperSpec, a hyperlinked HTML version, has been derived fro ...

, named Xerox Common Lisp. LOOPS, the object system for Interlisp-D, became, along with

Symbolics Symbolics was a computer manufacturer Symbolics, Inc., and a privately held company that acquired the assets of the former company and continues to sell and maintain the Open Genera Lisp system and the Macsyma computer algebra system.

' Flavors system, the basis for the

Common Lisp Object System The Common Lisp Object System (CLOS) is the facility for object-oriented programming which is part of ANSI Common Lisp. CLOS is a powerful dynamic object system which differs radically from the OOP facilities found in more static languages such ...

(CLOS). In 1974,

awarded a contract to the

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Insti ...

(UCSD) to implement Interlisp on the

Burroughs B6700 The Burroughs Large Systems Group produced a family of large 48-bit mainframes using stack machine instruction sets with dense syllables.E.g., 12-bit syllables for B5000, 8-bit syllables for B6500 The first machine in the family was the B5000 i ...

. The motivation was the larger virtual memory addressing space afforded by the B6700 architecture compared to the PDP-10. However, by the time the software was released (1975), the PDP-10's address space had been increased, and Interlisp-10 remained the standard of the day for AI research. The implementors were Bill Gord and Stan Sieler, with guidance from Daniel Bobrow, and under the overall management of Dr. Ken Bowles. UCSD Interlisp included a compiler which emitted "p-code", which was could be intermixed with standard LISP code during interpretation. This p-code appears to have preceded

UCSD Pascal UCSD Pascal is a Pascal programming language system that runs on the UCSD p-System, a portable, highly machine-independent operating system. UCSD Pascal was first released in 1977. It was developed at the University of California, San Diego (U ...

p-code by a year or two. The PDP-10 version of Interlisp became ''Interlisp-10''; BBN had an internal project to build ''Interlisp-Jericho'' and there was a 1982 port to Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD)

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

on the

VAX VAX (an acronym for Virtual Address eXtension) is a series of computers featuring a 32-bit instruction set architecture (ISA) and virtual memory that was developed and sold by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the late 20th century. The V ...

Information Sciences Institute The USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI) is a component of the University of Southern California (USC) Viterbi School of Engineering, and specializes in research and development in information processing, computing, and communications techn ...

(ISI) and Xerox PARC, called ''Interlisp-VAX''. In 1981, Warren Teitelman and

published a paper on Interlisp in

IEEE Computer ''Computer'' is an IEEE Computer Society practitioner-oriented magazine issued to all members of the society. It contains peer-reviewed articles, regular columns, and interviews on current computing-related issues. ''Computer'' provides informatio ...

providing an overview of the system and its design philosophy, setting starts used for the platform. Also in 1981, a variant for the

MOS Technology 6502 The MOS Technology 6502 (typically pronounced "sixty-five-oh-two" or "six-five-oh-two") William Mensch and the moderator both pronounce the 6502 microprocessor as ''"sixty-five-oh-two"''. is an 8-bit microprocessor that was designed by a small t ...

processor, INTER-LISP/65, was released by

Datasoft Datasoft, Inc. (also written as DataSoft and Data Soft) was a software developer and publisher for home computers founded in 1980 by Pat Ketchum and based out of Chatsworth, California. Datasoft primarily published video games, including home port ...

for the

Atari 800 The Atari 8-bit family is a series of 8-bit home computers introduced by Atari, Inc. in 1979 as the Atari 400 and Atari 800. The series was successively upgraded to Atari 1200XL , Atari 600XL, Atari 800XL, Atari 65XE, Atari 130XE, Atari 800XE ...

. In 1985 to 1987, a team from

Fuji Xerox was a joint venture partnership between the Japanese photographic firm Fujifilm Holdings and the American document management company Xerox to develop, produce and sell xerographic and document-related products and services in the Asia-Pacifi ...

developed an implementation of the microcoded

bytecode Bytecode (also called portable code or p-code) is a form of instruction set designed for efficient execution by a software interpreter. Unlike human-readable source code, bytecodes are compact numeric codes, constants, and references (norma ...

interpreter in the language C, and, together with Xerox AI Systems (XAIS) in

Sunnyvale, California Sunnyvale () is a city located in the Santa Clara Valley in northwest Santa Clara County in the U.S. state of California. Sunnyvale lies along the historic El Camino Real and Highway 101 and is bordered by portions of San Jose to the nort ...

, completed the port of the environment and emulator to the

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...

SPARC SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture originally developed by Sun Microsystems. Its design was strongly influenced by the experimental Berkeley RISC system developed ...

4 architecture. In 1987, XAIS was spun off into Envos Corporation, which failed almost immediately. Interlisp-D release timeline: * 1983 – Chorus * 1983 – Fugue * June 1984 – Carol * January 1985 – Harmony * 1985 – Intermezzo * December 1985 – Koto, first release to support the Xerox 1185/1186 workstation, some support for Common Lisp * June 1987 – Lyric, supports Xerox Common Lisp as part of the standard Lisp sysout * September 1988 – Medley, for Xerox 1100 and Sun 3 machines * February 1992 – Medley 2.0, includes CLOS with MOP, runs on various Unix machines,

DOS DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems. DOS may also refer to: Computing * Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel * Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicat ...

4.0, and the Xerox 1186 In 1992, an

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

(ACM)

Software System Award The ACM Software System Award is an annual award that honors people or an organization "for developing a software system that has had a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concepts, in commercial acceptance, or both". It is awarded by ...

recognized the team of

Daniel G. Bobrow Daniel Gureasko Bobrow (29 November 1935 – 20 March 2017) was an American computer scientist who created an oft-cited artificial intelligence program STUDENT (computer program), STUDENT, with which he earned his PhD., worked at BBN Technologies ( ...

, Richard R. Burton,

L. Peter Deutsch L Peter Deutsch (born Laurence Peter Deutsch on August 7, 1946, in Boston, Massachusetts) is the founder of Aladdin Enterprises and creator of Ghostscript, a free software PostScript and Portable Document Format, PDF interpreter. Deutsch's othe ...

for their pioneering work on Interlisp.

Revitalization

The Medley Interlisp source code and the source code for the virtual machine emulator have both been open-sourced by th
Medley Interlisp Project
The system runs on modern hardware/operating systems.

References

Publications

''et al.'', ''Interlisp Reference Manual'' (Xerox tech report, 1974) *

J Strother Moore J Strother Moore (his first name is the alphabetic character "J" – not an abbreviated "J.") is a computer scientist. He is a co-developer of the Boyer–Moore string-search algorithm, Boyer–Moore majority vote algorithm, and the Boyer–M ...

, ''The Interlisp Virtual Machine Specification'' (Xerox tech report, 1976) *

L Peter Deutsch L Peter Deutsch (born Laurence Peter Deutsch on August 7, 1946, in Boston, Massachusetts) is the founder of Aladdin Enterprises and creator of Ghostscript, a free software PostScript and Portable Document Format, PDF interpreter. Deutsch's othe ...

, ''A LISP Machine with Very Compact Programs'' (Third Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1973). * Kaisler, S. H. 1986 Interlisp: the Language and its Usage. Wiley-Interscience.

External links

Archived Interlisp documentation at bitsavers.org

LISPF4
an Interlisp interpreter written originally in Fortran by Mats Nordstrom and ported to C (

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

Mac OS Two major famlies of Mac operating systems were developed by Apple Inc. In 1984, Apple debuted the operating system that is now known as the "Classic" Mac OS with its release of the original Macintosh System Software. The system, rebranded "M ...

, and

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

) by Blake McBride.
Interlisp documentation at Computer History Museum

AtariAge forum discussion on INTER-LISP/65

AtariWiki entry for INTER-LISP/65

Medley Interlisp Project

Medley Interlisp source code repository
{{Lisp programming language Lisp (programming language) Dynamic programming languages Functional languages Lisp programming language family Lisp (programming language)-based operating systems Programming languages created in 1968

Adaptations

Revitalization

See also

References

Publications

External links