Lambda the Ultimate

Lisp Machines
started 1/13/2004; 10:30:05 PM - last post 1/19/2004; 1:54:51 AM

1/13/2004; 10:30:05 PM (reads: 13186, responses: 2)

Lisp Machines

This page is intended as a catalog of web-accessible information about Lisp Machines. Please notify me of any broken links: I keep local copies of many of the documents I link to, which I can post if they disappear from the net. Also, I always appreciate comments, as well as pointers to more Lisp Machine information, which I will gladly add to this page.

This is more Lisp Machine history than I have seen before on a single page. A lot of good stuff going back to the first early 1970s MIT papers on the CAR, CADR, etc. hardware and software, Chaosnet...

Chaosnet is a local network, that is, a system for communication among a group of computers located within about 1000 meters of each other. Originally developed by the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory as the internal communications medium of the Lisp Machine system, it has since come to be used to link a variey of machines around MIT and elsewhere.
Posted to history by Patrick Logan on 1/14/04; 9:21:05 AM

Peter Van Roy - Re: Lisp Machines

1/14/2004; 12:16:07 AM (reads: 420, responses: 0)

An interesting complement to this is the history of Prolog machines. See section 3.2 of 1983-1993: The Wonder Years of Sequential Prolog Implementation.

Luke Gorrie - Re: Lisp Machines

1/19/2004; 1:54:51 AM (reads: 127, responses: 0)

Movitz is a brand-new Lisp-on-bare-metal project. It consists of a Common Lisp compiler written in Common Lisp and with some extensions for low-level programming (e.g. inline X86 assembler). It includes some basic device drivers for the keyboard and network. Using SBCL it's easy to compile an image which can be booted from a floppy to bring up a REPL.