On 10/1/2019 7:23 PM, Mark Kahrs via cctalk wrote:
The first implementation was done for the 7090 by McCarthy (hence CAR and
CDR --- Contents of Address Register and Contents of Decrement Register).
If you want to see a tiny implementation then look for the PDP-1
implementation done by L Peter Deutsch. There's a book chapter and then I
found this report:
http://s3data.computerhistory.org/pdp-1/DEC.pdp_1.1964.102650371.pdf
When I was at UMR a couple of students wrote a Lisp interpreter for the
Micro 1600 running the 1621 firmware. It had the missing feature that
there was no garbage collect, and would die when the cells storage ran
out. Very quickly.
They then added paging to a 5mb dynex and used the entire space of the
bottom platter, at 2.5mb and ran a lot longer with paging.
And they then added a firmware assist to do a couple of operations if
they were recognized, and it supposedly ran a bit faster, but with disk
paging, hard to tell.
I could try to dig up the source if anyone is interested and share it.
I've got an emulator which runs the OS and firmware for the 1621 and
it's on my list of programs to resurrect and get running.
FWIW, I had soaked up enough lisp from this and a version which ran in
batch on the 360/50 MVT system that I knew it well enough to be
dangerous on the Multics system at the University of Southwestern
Louisiana, Lafayette, LA
It of course ran maclisp. The main thing that was fun to play with
there was macsyma. When Professor Jerry Saltzer visited the site was
grateful to visit with him as he had a lot to do with the system and
macsyma in particular.
Forget Eliza and such, if you had macsyma in 1975, you'd swear you were
talking to something out of this world. I also remembered enough of my
math to run it thru a lot of problems and it was able to figure them
out, even with some trickery.
There is a version for the Multics Emulator, but I don't think the
version I could have saved in 1975 was saved. I hope to get that
running at some point (most likely after someone else gets it running,
as macsyma isn't a program for the faint hearted to try to get running).
thanks
Jim
