1976, UCSD. So I was using your Lisp.
I got a position on the UCSD Pascal project half way through that year (reunion
in just 2 weeks). So I’m very familiar with the p-code and how all that works
as well.
In 1978 I discovered Unix on a 780 in the 4th(?) floor lab and made the switch
from Pascal to C. Been a hard core Unix developer ever since. As a result my
name appears in almost all Apple products in the legal section.
David
> On Oct 3, 2019, at 11:16 PM, Stan Sieler <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> David...where did you use Lisp on a B6700?
>
> Bill Gord and I wrote the first INTERLISP interpreter for the B6700 back
> around
> 1974-1975, on a DARPA contract, at UCSD. (At the start, it was to implement
> BBNLISP,
> but the name changed during the project :)
>
> DARPA found that researchers using INTERLISP (or others) on Dec PDP10s (and
> similar) were hampered by the limited address space (256K virtual memory).
> The B6700 offered a significantly larger address space (and many other
> features, of course :)
> (I know our LISP got distributed to other Burroughs sites in those days,
> just like our STARTREK and Bob Jardine's SOLAR.)
>
> Danny Bobrow (with Xerox PARC at the time) came and helped us get started.
> I met Warren Teitelman ... he had no idea that the cover of the INTERLISP
> manual was an homage to his last name. (See:
> http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/interlisp/Interlisp_Reference_Manual_Oct_1974.pdf
>
> <http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/interlisp/Interlisp_Reference_Manual_Oct_1974.pdf>
> )
>
> We got our system up and running, including DWIM and other packages, and were
> told ... oops, DEC figured out how to expand the amount of virtual memory on
> the PDP-10, so we don't need to buy Burroughs mainframes now!
>
> Our INTERLISP was a full interpreter, and also had a compiler to LISP p-code,
> which might have inspired UCSD Pascal's p-code (Ken Bowles was our boss).
>
> I believe I have the source, in Burroughs ALGOL.
>
> As a side bonus, I got to interact with Danny, and people from PARC and BBN
> as we were watching other UCSD Computer Center people put the B6700 on the
> ARPANET. (I think we were something like the 25th computer.)
>
> Stan Sieler
>
>
