[SCC_Active_Members] Presentation at LISP conference went very well

[Paul McJones]

I gave my 5-minute presentation this morning at the International Lisp 
Conference going on at Stanford this week, and it was received very 
well. People came up and talked to me for a half hour afterwards; I had 
to leave after a while before my parking place expired.

J Strother Moore (co-inventor of the Boyer-Moore theorem prover and the 
Boyer-Moore fast string searching algorithm, asked if I would be 
interested in collecting these things (YES!), and volunteered to help 
round up other materials at the University of Texas, where he chairs the 
CS department.

Mabry Tyson at SRI volunteered to help with a variety of Lisps he's been 
involved with at the University of Texas and SRI. Lynn Quam, now at SRI, 
is a coauthor with Whit Diffie of Stanford Lisp 1.6; he agreed to help 
me track down items from its history.

Taiichi Yuasa, a coauthor of Kyoto Common Lisp, offered to help me in 
any way he can contacting other Japanese researchers.

James Massar mentioned that the Connection Machine had two different 
Lisps; I think he and Tyson can help track down some materials relating 
to them. He also mentioned there are still several complete Connection 
Machines on the west coast (Xerox and SRI???) and he wondered if CHM 
would be interested in acquiring them.

A fellow named Bob Kirby had implemented a Lisp for the PDP-11 at the 
University of Maryland that he says was used for image processing for a 
long time -- not one of the mainstream Lisps, but still interesting.

JonL White. early MacLisp guru, who I recently tracked down (he lives in 
Mountain View) was the session chair, so I got to meet him in person 
finally. He's a great guy, and very helpful, but he has lost his own 
archives after many moves.

Finally, Jack Harper was there -- he's the guy who first tracked down 
the LISP 1.5 listing that Tim Hart donated to the MIT Museum; this is 
the one that he scanned and that Olin Sibert has rescanned at a higher 
resolution. I'm going to meet him late this afternoon for a longer chat.

All in all, it was a great way to get the word out and meet people.. I 
suggest we should have people do this at OOPSLA, SIGOPS, SIGMOD, and 
various other conferences.


Paul