Interlisp

Interlisp (also seen with a variety of capitalizations) was a version of the Lisp programming language originally developed in 1967 at Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was later adopted at Xerox PARC, and in its Interlisp-D incarnation, was the variety of Lisp which ran on the Xerox 1108 and 1186 "AI Workstations". Interlisp was notable for the integration of interactive development tools into the environment, such as a debugger, an automatic correction tool for simple errors (DWIM - "do what I mean"), and analysis tools.

It was originally developed as a successor to BBN LISP . Interlisp-10, the earliest version, ran on PDP-10 machines. When Danny Bobrow moved from BBN to PARC, he brought Interlisp with him, and it became the popular Lisp dialect for AI researchers at Stanford University.

Later a virtual machine was defined in order to facilitate porting, known as the "Interlisp virtual machine".

At PARC, Interlisp was ported to the Lisp machines in development there, and was known as Interlisp-D.

A 1982 port of the virtual machine to the VAX running BSD Unix resulted in Interlisp-VAX.

In 1987, Interlisp was ported to the Sun Microsystems SPARC 4 architecture by a team at Xerox AI Systems (XAIS) in Sunnyvale, California. Later that year, XAIS, which had been a money-loser for some time for Xerox, was spun off into Envos Corporation , which almost immediately failed.

In 1992, an ACM Software System Award recognized the team of Daniel G. Bobrow , Richard R. Burton , L. Peter Deutsch, Ronald M. Kaplan , Larry Masinter , Warren Teitelman for their pioneering work on Interlisp.

References

• Warren Teitelman et al., Interlisp Reference Manual (Xerox tech report, 1974)
• James S. Moore , The Interlisp Virtual Machine Specification (Xerox tech report, 1976)