Interlisp
Encyclopedia
Interlisp was a programming environment built around a version of the Lisp programming language
. Interlisp development began in 1967 at Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Massachusetts
as BBN LISP
, which ran on PDP-10
machines running the TENEX
operating system. When Danny Bobrow, Warren Teitelman
and Ronald Kaplan
moved from BBN to Xerox PARC
, it was renamed Interlisp. Interlisp became a popular Lisp development tool for AI researchers at Stanford University
and elsewhere in the DARPA community. 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.
, there was an early attempt to define a virtual machine
to facilitate porting, known as the "Interlisp virtual machine". However, this wasn't useful as a basis for porting.
Peter Deutsch
defined a byte-coded instruction set for Interlisp, and implemented it as a microcoded emulator for the Xerox Alto
. This was subsequently ported to a series of workstation designs produced by Xerox for both their own use and for commercial exploitation, including 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 Machine
s and branded as Xerox AI Workstations; 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-ANSI
Common Lisp
, known as Xerox Common Lisp. LOOPS, the object system for Interlisp-D, became, along with Symbolics
' FLAVORS
system, the basis for the Common Lisp Object System.
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 Unix
on the VAX
by Stanford University
, ISI
and Xerox PARC, called Interlisp-VAX.
In 1981, Warren Teitelman and Larry Masinter published a paper on Interlisp in IEEE Computer that provides a nice overview of the system and its design philosophy.
In 1985-7, a team from Fuji Xerox
developed a C implementation of the microcoded bytecode interpreter, and, together with Xerox AI Systems (XAIS) in Sunnyvale, California
, completed the port of the environment and emulator to the Sun Microsystems
SPARC
4 architecture. In 1987, XAIS 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 Kaplan
, Larry Masinter, Warren Teitelman
for their pioneering work on Interlisp.
Lisp programming language
Lisp is a family of computer programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized syntax. Originally specified in 1958, Lisp is the second-oldest high-level programming language in widespread use today; only Fortran is older...
. Interlisp development began in 1967 at Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...
as BBN LISP
BBN LISP
BBN LISP was a dialect of the Lisp programming language by Bolt, Beranek and Newman Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was based on L. Peter Deutsch's implementation of Lisp for the PDP-1 , which was developed from 1960 to 1964...
, which ran on PDP-10
PDP-10
The PDP-10 was a mainframe computer family manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation from the late 1960s on; the name stands for "Programmed Data Processor model 10". The first model was delivered in 1966...
machines running the TENEX
TOPS-20
The TOPS-20 operating system by Digital Equipment Corporation was the second proprietary OS for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. TOPS-20 began in 1969 as the TENEX operating system of Bolt, Beranek and Newman...
operating system. When Danny Bobrow, Warren Teitelman
Warren Teitelman
Warren Teitelman is a computer scientist since 1960 to date, who contributed to and invented many technologies like Interlisp.- Early career and ARPANET :...
and Ronald Kaplan
Ronald Kaplan
Ronald M. Kaplan is Chief Scientist and a Principal Researcher at the Powerset division of Microsoft Bing. He is also a Consulting Professor in the Linguistics Department at Stanford University and a Principal of Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information...
moved from BBN to Xerox PARC
Xerox PARC
PARC , formerly Xerox PARC, is a research and co-development company in Palo Alto, California, with a distinguished reputation for its contributions to information technology and hardware systems....
, it was renamed Interlisp. Interlisp became a popular Lisp development tool for AI researchers at Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
and elsewhere in the DARPA community. Interlisp was notable for the integration of interactive development tools into the environment, such as a debugger
Debugger
A debugger or debugging tool is a computer program that is used to test and debug other programs . The code to be examined might alternatively be running on an instruction set simulator , a technique that allows great power in its ability to halt when specific conditions are encountered but which...
, an automatic correction tool for simple errors (DWIM
DWIM
DWIM computer systems attempt to anticipate what users intend to do, correcting trivial errors automatically rather than blindly executing users' explicit but incorrect input...
- "do what I mean"), and analysis tools.
Adaptations
At Xerox PARCXerox PARC
PARC , formerly Xerox PARC, is a research and co-development company in Palo Alto, California, with a distinguished reputation for its contributions to information technology and hardware systems....
, there was an early attempt to define a virtual machine
Virtual machine
A virtual machine is a "completely isolated guest operating system installation within a normal host operating system". Modern virtual machines are implemented with either software emulation or hardware virtualization or both together.-VM Definitions:A virtual machine is a software...
to facilitate porting, known as the "Interlisp virtual machine". However, this wasn't useful as a basis for porting.
Peter Deutsch
L. Peter Deutsch
L Peter Deutsch or Peter Deutsch is the founder of Aladdin Enterprises and creator of Ghostscript, a free software PostScript and PDF interpreter....
defined a byte-coded instruction set for Interlisp, and implemented it as a microcoded emulator for the Xerox Alto
Xerox Alto
The Xerox Alto was one of the first computers designed for individual use , making it arguably what is now called a personal computer. It was developed at Xerox PARC in 1973...
. This was subsequently ported to a series of workstation designs produced by Xerox for both their own use and for commercial exploitation, including the Xerox 1100 (Dolphin), 1108 (Dandelion), 1109 (the floating-point enabled "Dandetiger"), 1186 (Daybreak)
Xerox Daybreak
Xerox Daybreak is a workstation computer marketed by Xerox from 1985 to 1989. It ran the ViewPoint GUI and was used extensively throughout Xerox until being replaced by Suns and PCs...
, and 1132 (Dorado). Interlisp implementations for these were known collectively as Interlisp-D. Commercially, these were sold as Lisp Machine
Lisp machine
Lisp machines were general-purpose computers designed to efficiently run Lisp as their main software language. In a sense, they were the first commercial single-user workstations...
s and branded as Xerox AI Workstations; 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-ANSI
Ansi
Ansi is a village in Kaarma Parish, Saare County, on the island of Saaremaa, Estonia....
Common Lisp
Common Lisp
Common Lisp, commonly abbreviated CL, is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in ANSI standard document ANSI INCITS 226-1994 , . From the ANSI Common Lisp standard the Common Lisp HyperSpec has been derived for use with web browsers...
, known as Xerox Common Lisp. LOOPS, the object system for Interlisp-D, became, along with Symbolics
Symbolics
Symbolics refers to two companies: now-defunct computer manufacturer Symbolics, Inc., and a privately held company that acquired the assets of the former company and continues to sell and maintain the Open Genera Lisp system and the Macsyma computer algebra system.The symbolics.com domain was...
' FLAVORS
Flavors
Flavors, an early object-oriented extension to Lisp developed by Howard Cannon at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory for the Lisp machine and its programming language Lisp Machine Lisp, was the first programming language to include mixins...
system, the basis for the Common Lisp Object System.
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 Unix
Berkeley Software Distribution
Berkeley Software Distribution is a Unix operating system derivative developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group of the University of California, Berkeley, from 1977 to 1995...
on the VAX
VAX
VAX was an instruction set architecture developed by Digital Equipment Corporation in the mid-1970s. A 32-bit complex instruction set computer ISA, it was designed to extend or replace DEC's various Programmed Data Processor ISAs...
by Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
, ISI
Information Sciences Institute
The Information Sciences Institute is a research and development unit of the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering which focuses on computer and communications technology and information processing...
and Xerox PARC, called Interlisp-VAX.
In 1981, Warren Teitelman and Larry Masinter published a paper on Interlisp in IEEE Computer that provides a nice overview of the system and its design philosophy.
In 1985-7, a team from Fuji Xerox
Fuji Xerox
is a joint venture partnership between the Japanese photographic firm Fuji Photo Film Co. and the American document management company Xerox to develop, produce and sell xerographic and document-related products and services in the Asia-Pacific region...
developed a C implementation of the microcoded bytecode interpreter, and, together with Xerox AI Systems (XAIS) in Sunnyvale, California
Sunnyvale, California
Sunnyvale is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States. It is one of the major cities that make up the Silicon Valley located in the San Francisco Bay Area...
, completed the port of the environment and emulator to the Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...
SPARC
SPARC
SPARC is a RISC instruction set architecture developed by Sun Microsystems and introduced in mid-1987....
4 architecture. In 1987, XAIS was spun off into Envos Corporation, which almost immediately failed.
In 1992, an ACM
Association for Computing Machinery
The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...
Software System Award recognized the team of Daniel G. Bobrow
Daniel G. Bobrow
Daniel Gureasko Bobrow is a Research Fellow in the Intelligent Systems Laboratory of the Palo Alto Research Center, and is amongst other things known for creating an oft-cited artificial intelligence program STUDENT, with which he earned his PhD....
, Richard R. Burton, L. Peter Deutsch
L. Peter Deutsch
L Peter Deutsch or Peter Deutsch is the founder of Aladdin Enterprises and creator of Ghostscript, a free software PostScript and PDF interpreter....
, Ronald Kaplan
Ronald Kaplan
Ronald M. Kaplan is Chief Scientist and a Principal Researcher at the Powerset division of Microsoft Bing. He is also a Consulting Professor in the Linguistics Department at Stanford University and a Principal of Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information...
, Larry Masinter, Warren Teitelman
Warren Teitelman
Warren Teitelman is a computer scientist since 1960 to date, who contributed to and invented many technologies like Interlisp.- Early career and ARPANET :...
for their pioneering work on Interlisp.
Publications
- Warren TeitelmanWarren TeitelmanWarren Teitelman is a computer scientist since 1960 to date, who contributed to and invented many technologies like Interlisp.- Early career and ARPANET :...
et al., Interlisp Reference Manual (Xerox tech report, 1974) - J Strother MooreJ Strother MooreJ Strother Moore is a computer scientist, and he is a co-developer of the Boyer–Moore string search algorithm and the Boyer–Moore automated theorem prover, Nqthm. An example of the workings of the Boyer–Moore string search algorithm is given...
, The Interlisp Virtual Machine Specification (Xerox tech report, 1976) - L Peter DeutschL. Peter DeutschL Peter Deutsch or Peter Deutsch is the founder of Aladdin Enterprises and creator of Ghostscript, a free software PostScript and PDF interpreter....
, 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 FortranFortranFortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...
by Mats Nordstrom and ported to CC (programming language)C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....
(WindowsMicrosoft WindowsMicrosoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
and LinuxLinuxLinux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
) by Blake McBride. - Interlisp documentation at Computer History Museum.