- Interlisp
Interlisp (also seen with a variety of capitalizations) was a programming environment built around a version of the
Lisp programming language . Interlisp development began in 1967 atBolt, Beranek and Newman inCambridge, Massachusetts asBBN LISP , which ran onPDP-10 machines running theTENEX operating system. When Danny Bobrow,Warren Teitelman andRon Kaplan moved from BBN toXerox PARC , it was renamed Interlisp. Interlisp became a popular Lisp development tool for AI researchers atStanford University and elsewhere in theDARPA community. Interlisp was notable for the integration of interactive development tools into the environment, such as adebugger , an automatic correction tool for simple errors (DWIM - "do what I mean"), and analysis tools.Adaptations
At
Xerox PARC , there was an early attempt to define avirtual machine to facilitate porting, known as the "Interlisp virtual machine". However, this wasn't useful as a basis for porting.Peter Deutsch defined for a byte-coded instruction set for Interlisp, and implemented a microcoded emulator for the
Xerox Alto , and then later to the microcoded machines developed by Xerox (originally for the Mesa and Cedar language/environments). These implementations (for machines whose code names started with D) were collectively known as Interlisp-D, and branded as the Xerox 1100 (Dolphin), 1108 (Dandelion), 1186 (Daybreak), and 1132 (Dorado) "AI Workstations".The PDP-10 version became Interlisp-10; BBN had an internal project to build Interlisp-Jericho and there was a 1982 port to the
VAX resulting in Interlisp-VAX.In 1985-7, a team from
Fuji Xerox developed a C implementation of the microcoded bytecode interpreter, and, together withXerox AI Systems (XAIS) inSunnyvale, California , completed the port of the environment and emulator to theSun Microsystems SPARC 4 architecture. In 1987, XAIS was spun off intoEnvos Corporation , which almost immediately failed.In 1992, an ACM
Software System Award recognized the team ofDaniel G. Bobrow ,Richard R. Burton ,L. Peter Deutsch ,Ronald Kaplan ,Larry Masinter ,Warren Teitelman for their pioneering work on Interlisp.References
*
Warren Teitelman "et al.", "Interlisp Reference Manual" (Xerox tech report, 1974)
*J Strother Moore , "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).External links
* [http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/interlisp/ Archived Interlisp documentation at bitsavers.org]
* [http://blake.mcbride.name/software/lispf4/index.html LISPF4] an Interlisp interpreter written originally inFortran byMats Nordstrom and ported to C (Windows andLinux ) byBlake McBride .
* [http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/interlisp Interlisp documentation at Computer History Museum] .
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