Software Preservation Group of the Computer History Museum

LISP 2 family

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LISP 2

"The LISP 2 project was a collaboration of System Development Corporation and Information International Inc., and was initially planned for the Q32 computer, which was built by IBM for military purposes and which had a 48 bit word and 18 bit addresses, i.e., it was better than the IBM 7090 for an ambitious project. Unfortunately, the Q32 at SDC was never equipped with more than 48K words of this memory. When it became clear that the Q32 had too little memory, it was decided to develop the language for the IBM 360/67 and the Digital Equipment PDP-6 — SDC was acquiring the former, while III and M.I.T. and Stanford preferred the latter. The project proved more expensive than expected, the collaboration proved more difficult than expected, and so LISP 2 was dropped. From a 1970s point of view, this was regrettable, because much more money has since been spent to develop LISPs with fewer features. However, it was not then known that the dominant machine for AI research would be the PDP-10, a successor of the PDP-6. A part of the AI community, e.g. BBN and SRI made what proved to be an architectural digression in doing AI work on the SDS 940 computer." [McCarthy 1978]

Source code

Documentation

Papers

GTL for Burroughs B 5500 at Georgia Institute of Technology

CRISP for IBM 370 at SDC

CRISP was a Lisp-like programming language and system designed by Jeffrey A. Barnett and Doug Pintar specifically for speech research in the 1973-1974 timeframe. Its name derived from the phrase "Crunching Lisp," and it was to run on the IBM 370 using the VM operating system. The CRISP runtime system was implemented and used via a powerful assembler, although the higher-level CRISP language was not implemented. For an overview, see: Barnett 2010 and Barnett 2009.

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