Interlisp (also seen with a variety of capitalizations) is a programming environment built around a version of the programming language

Lisp Lisp (historically LISP, an abbreviation of "list processing") is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized Polish notation#Explanation, prefix notation. Originally specified in the late 1950s, ...

. 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 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1966, the Franklin Institute awarded the firm the Frank P. Brown Medal, in 1999 BBN received the ...

) in

Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. It is a suburb in the Greater Boston metropolitan area, located directly across the Charles River from Boston. The city's population as of the 2020 United States census, ...

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 until ...

(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 known for being the most important computer in the creation of hacker culture at the Massachusetts ...

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 and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

TENEX (renamed TOPS-20). In 1973, when Danny Bobrow, Warren Teitelman and Ronald Kaplan 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 the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

(AI) researchers at

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

and elsewhere in the

community A community is a social unit (a group of people) with a shared socially-significant characteristic, such as place, set of norms, culture, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given g ...

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 Adva ...

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

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

(IDE), such as a

debugger A debugger is a computer program used to test and debug other programs (the "target" programs). Common features of debuggers include the ability to run or halt the target program using breakpoints, step through code line by line, and display ...

, an automatic correction tool for simple errors (via do what I mean ( DWIM) 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 or emulator, emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide the functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve ...

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 desig ...

, termed the ''Interlisp virtual machine''. However, it was not useful as a basis for porting. Peter Deutsch defined a byte-coded instruction set for Interlisp, and implemented it as a

microcode In processor design, microcode serves as an intermediary layer situated between the central processing unit (CPU) hardware and the programmer-visible instruction set architecture of a computer. It consists of a set of hardware-level instructions ...

emulator for the Xerox Alto. This was then ported to a series of workstation designs produced by

Xerox Xerox Holdings Corporation (, ) is an American corporation that sells print and electronic document, digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox was the pioneer of the photocopier market, beginning with the introduc ...

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 machines and branded as Xerox AI Workstations when Larry Masinter 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 nonprofit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes, systems, and personnel in the United States. The organiz ...

(ANSI)

Common Lisp Common Lisp (CL) is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standard document ''ANSI INCITS 226-1994 (S2018)'' (formerly ''X3.226-1994 (R1999)''). The Common Lisp HyperSpec, a hyperli ...

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

Symbolics Symbolics, Inc., is a privately held American computer software maker that acquired the assets of the former manufacturing company of the identical name and continues to sell and maintain the Open Genera Lisp (programming language), Lisp sy ...

Flavors Flavour or flavor is either the sensory perception of taste or smell, or a flavoring in food that produces such perception. Flavour or flavor may also refer to: Science * Flavors (programming language), an early object-oriented extension to L ...

system, the basis for the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS). In 1974,

awarded a contract to the

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego in communications material, formerly and colloquially UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California, United States. Es ...

(UCSD) to implement Interlisp on the Burroughs B6700. 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 (UC ...

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 The Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), also known as Berkeley Unix or BSD Unix, is a discontinued Unix operating system developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley, beginn ...

(BSD)

Unix Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user 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, a ...

on the VAX by

, Information Sciences Institute (ISI) and Xerox PARC, called ''Interlisp-VAX''. In 1981, Warren Teitelman and Larry Masinter published a paper on Interlisp in IEEE Computer 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 computing, 8-bit microprocessor that was desi ...

processor, INTER-LISP/65, was released by

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

for the Atari 8-bit computers. In 1985 to 1987, a team from Fuji Xerox 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 (normal ...

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 northwestern Santa Clara County, California, United States. Sunnyvale lies along the historic El Camino Real (California), El Camino Real and U.S. Route 101 in California, Highway 1 ...

, completed the port of the environment and emulator to the

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

SPARC 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 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 membe ...

(ACM) Software System Award recognized the team of Daniel G. Bobrow, Richard R. Burton,

L. Peter Deutsch L Peter Deutsch (born Laurence Peter Deutsch on August 7, 1946, in Boston, Massachusetts) is an American computer scientist and composer. He is the founder of Aladdin Enterprises and creator of Ghostscript, a free software PostScript and PDF int ...

, Ronald Kaplan, Larry Masinter, Warren Teitelman 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

* Warren Teitelman ''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 an American computer scientist. He is a co-developer of the Boyer–Moore string-search algorithm, Boyer–Moore majority vote algorithm, and the Boy ...

, ''The Interlisp Virtual Machine Specification'' (Xerox tech report, 1976) * L Peter Deutsch, ''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 Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

Mac OS Mac operating systems were developed by Apple Inc. in a succession of two major series. 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 ...

, and

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

) 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