Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Bias in X3J13? (long and possibly boring)
In-Reply-To: sef@CS.CMU.EDU's message of 24 Oct 1994 05:29:05 GMT
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References: <37eb4h$k4f@vertex.tor.hookup.net> <hbakerCxquDG.LEF@netcom.com>
	<Cxxwx0.1nC@rheged.dircon.co.uk> <3854ul$r5r@cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu>
	<Cy5F1E.4xq@rheged.dircon.co.uk> <38fgn1$f82@cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: Tue, 25 Oct 1994 00:14:48 GMT
Lines: 36

In article <38fgn1$f82@cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu> sef@CS.CMU.EDU
(Scott Fahlman) writes:

>In article <Cy5F1E.4xq@rheged.dircon.co.uk> simon@rheged.dircon.co.uk
>(Simon Brooke) writes:

>>I'm not aware -- perhaps I'm inadequately informed -- of any LisP machine
>>marketed by IBM; certainly not of one which was ever to any extent widely
>>used. Similarly I'm not aware of any major widely used LisP implementation
>>developed by IBM.

>IBM had a good internal group working on Lisp, and used it internally on
>several projects.  I don't remember whether they ever brought out a product,
>but it wasn't a success in any case because AIpeople didn't run on IBM
>machines.  Anyway, this comment was just an aside.

IBM's productized version of Lisp was VMLisp, an outgrowth of an earlier
Installed User Program (IBMese for CUSP) called Lisp/370.

It was used by the Crewe Labs at University of Chicago (among other languages)
in their work on the Scanning Transmission Electronic Microscope (the one that
looked at individual atoms first).  The Computation Center was located in the
same building, and as a systems programmer I got to be friendly with their
programmers.

It was also used for a while by the IMSSS folks at Stanford, till they started
using Lucid on various Unix boxen, as a possible replacement for PSL.  (If I've
remembered that wrong, Tryg Ager will scold me when he hears about it.)

It was based on an in-core-editing listener that only worked on 3270-type
terminals.  Pardon me, but EEUUUUCCCHHHHHHHH!
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
