Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
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From: jbarnett@shomase.NoSubdomain.NoDomain (Jeff Barnett)
Subject: Re: IBM 360/Lisp
Message-ID: <DoopBq.KKM@gremlin.nrtc.northrop.com>
Sender: news@gremlin.nrtc.northrop.com (Usenet News Manager)
Reply-To: jbarnett@charming.nrtc.northrop.com
Organization: Northrop Automation Sciences Laboratory
References:  <jharper-1903961214180001@p35.denver1.dialup.csn.net>
Date: Fri, 22 Mar 1996 19:40:37 GMT
Lines: 38

In article <jharper-1903961214180001@p35.denver1.dialup.csn.net>, jharper@bs2000.com (Jack Harper) writes:
|> I am building a web page regarding, primarily, the technical history of
|> the early days of Lisp -- 1958 or so -> 1970 or so. One of the things that
|> I would like to include in the page are listings of the actual source code
|> for the early implementations as well as source code for early historical
|> applications.
|> 
|> So -- I would very much appreciate if someone could direct me in the
|> direction of hopefully finding a listing of 360/Lisp circa 1965-1970
|> preferably in some sort of machine readable form if possible -- although I
|> would gladly take whatever I could get!

Hi,

Bob Long and I wrote a Lisp 1.5 for the 360 during that time period
while we were at SDC.  That system was eventually used for the SDC
work on the ARPA Speech Understanding Research project and many, many
other things.  It was a full optimizing compiler and was interactive.
The original implementation ran on a specialized ARPA-sponsored OS.
Later, I moved it to VM.  BTW, eval just called the compiler, ran the
code, then let the gc reclaim the memory later.  Unfortunately, no
machine readable listing remains.  (Though you might contact U. of
Waterloo -- they used the system for a while, and who knows ...)
Before doing this Lisp, we talked to the IBM folks at Yorktown H.
to see if our goals were compatible enough to work together.  They
weren't.  So we each did our own Lisp.

Later, Doug Pintar and I did a hack called CRISP -- crunching Lisp for
the 370s under VM.  CRISP had real data representation knowledge (unboxed
stuff went on a different stack than the pointers), full context objects
(essentially, a tree of stack frames was used instead of a stack), and
many of the ideas developed in Lisp2 resurfaced (e.g., a kind of
package mechanism).  A fellow at Princeton, whos name escapes me,
collected listings and implementations of arcane languages.  Poke 
around in there CS dept and computer center.  You might get lucky.  I
sent him (whoever he is) either our Lisp or CRISP a million years ago.

Jeff Barnett
