computer programming Computer programming is the process of performing a particular computation (or more generally, accomplishing a specific computing result), usually by designing and building an executable computer program. Programming involves tasks such as anal ...

, Franz Lisp is a discontinued Lisp programming language system written at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant un ...

(UC Berkeley, UCB) by Professor Richard Fateman and several students, based largely on Maclisp and distributed with the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) 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 un ...

(DEC) VAX minicomputer. Piggybacking on the popularity of the BSD package, Franz Lisp was probably the most widely distributed and used Lisp system of the 1970s and 1980s. The name is a pun on the composer and pianist

Franz Liszt Franz Liszt, in modern usage ''Liszt Ferenc'' . Liszt's Hungarian passport spelled his given name as "Ferencz". An orthographic reform of the Hungarian language in 1922 (which was 36 years after Liszt's death) changed the letter "cz" to simpl ...

. It was written specifically to be a host for running the

Macsyma Macsyma (; "Project MAC's SYmbolic MAnipulator") is one of the oldest general-purpose computer algebra systems still in wide use. It was originally developed from 1968 to 1982 at MIT's Project MAC. In 1982, Macsyma was licensed to Symbolics a ...

computer algebra In mathematics and computer science, computer algebra, also called symbolic computation or algebraic computation, is a scientific area that refers to the study and development of algorithms and software for manipulating mathematical expressions ...

system on VAX. The project began at the end of 1978, soon after UC Berkeley took delivery of their first VAX 11/780 (named Ernie CoVax, after

Ernie Kovacs Ernest Edward Kovacs (January 23, 1919 – January 13, 1962) was a Hungarian-American comedian, actor, and writer. Kovacs's visually experimental and often spontaneous comedic style influenced numerous television comedy programs for years afte ...

, the first of many systems with pun names at UCB). Franz Lisp was available free of charge to educational sites, and was also distributed on Eunice, a Berkeley

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, ...

emulator that ran on VAX VMS.

History

At the time of Franz Lisp's creation, the Macsyma computer algebra system ran mainly on a DEC

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, espec ...

. This computer's limited address space caused difficulties. Attempted remedies included ports of Maclisp to

Multics Multics ("Multiplexed Information and Computing Service") is an influential early time-sharing operating system based on the concept of a single-level memory.Dennis M. Ritchie, "The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System", Communications of ...

or Lisp machines, but even if successful, these would only be solutions for the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of th ...

(MIT) as these machines were costly and uncommon. Franz Lisp was the first example of a framework where large Lisp programs could be run outside the Lisp machines environment; Macsyma was then considered a very large program. After being ported to Franz Lisp, Macsyma was distributed to about 50 sites under a license restricted by MIT's interest in making Macsyma

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