Stoyan has been involved with Lisp for four decades. In the early 1970s he implemented Lisp using only Berkeley and Bobrow as a reference, and this system became the basis for all artificial intelligence work in his native East Germany. In the late 1970s he became interested in the history of Lisp, and published the book LISP – Anwendungsgebiete, Grundbegriffe, Geschichte (Akademie-Verlag, Berlin, 1980) about Lisp and its history. In 1981 he emigrated to West Germany and began a career as a university professor; by 1990 he became Professor of Artificial Intelligence of the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. He also wrote the two-volume Programmiermethoden der Künstlichen Intelligenz (Springer, 1988) about artificial intelligence programming. (For more details, see his speaker biography from the 2007 International Lisp Conference.)

In addition to his first book, Stoyan has published a number of papers on the early history of Lisp, including:

• LISP History. LISP Bulletin #3, December 1979, pages 44-55. PDF at www.artinfo-musinfo.org and ACM Digital Library
• Early LISP history (1956-1959). A version was published in: Proceedings of the 1984 ACM Symposium on LISP and functional programming, Austin, Texas, pages 299-310. ACM Digital Library
• The Influence of the Designer on the Design – J. McCarthy and Lisp. Originally published in: V. Lifschitz, editor. Artificial Intelligence and Mathematical Theory of Computation: Papers in Honor of John McCarthy. Academic Press Professional, Inc., 1991.
• Lisp: Themes and History. Invited Lecture at International Lisp Conference 2007. MP3 at CHM

The Herbert Stoyan Collection on LISP Programming (Lot X5687.2010) is quite large (94.5 linear feet in 87 boxes), and the Museum is currently in the throws of construction for the major new exhibit Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing. But through the combined efforts of staff and volunteers, the collection will be organized and made accessible, with portions scanned and available online. To get a taste of the depth and breadth of the collection, see Stoyan’s LISP Bibliography and searchable LISP-Museum.

The arrival of this collection at CHM fulfills a dream that began for me in 2005 as I began work on History of LISP and first contacted Herbert Stoyan to timidly suggest he might contribute scans of selected items from his collection to CHM. His response — that he would be retiring in 3 years and needed to think about a permanent home for his collection — encouraged me to think that CHM might be the recipient. To get here from there, many people played important roles. At the risk of forgetting someone, I would like to thank Alex Bochannek, Grady Booch, Elizabeth Borchardt, Richard Gabriel, William Harnack, John Hollar, Paul Jabloner, Al Kossow, Karen Kroslowitz, Sara Lott, Bernard Peuto, Len Shustek, Dag Spicer, Herbert Stoyan, Kirsten Tashev, and JonL White. In addition, CHM volunteers John Dobyns and Randall Neff have labored to survey, pack, and catalog portions of the collection. (Additional volunteers would be welcome!)

By the way, what was previously called the Software Collection Committee at the Computer History Museum has a new name (the Software Preservation Group), a new domain name (www.softwarepreservation.org) and a new chairman (Al Kossow, the Museum’s Software Curator and the creator of www.bitsavers.org).

In the spring of this year, the Computer History Museum was contacted by someone who had several SDS 900 series machines, and told us that he had the entire SDS software library from Honeywell in the early 80’s.

The donation arrived at CHM on Friday, and I’ve spent the past few days going through it. It does, in fact contain ALMOST the entire collection as it existed at Honeywell in March, 1982. Unfortunately, the 940 timesharing system software was already gone from the library by 1982. Two 940 archive tapes, a set of user programs and the off-line diagnostics have survived.

There is a very large collection of user’s manuals, program writeups, paper and magnetic tape. This is the largest software collection that has survived largely in one piece from a 60’s computer manufacturer that I’ve ever seen.

Scans of most of the program library listings are on line now at bitsavers under pdf/sds/9xx/programLibrary. I’m in the process of post-processing several dozen programming and other user’s manuals.

There are about 100 7-track tapes which will have to wait until I have a reliable way to read them. The smaller program library programs were written to 9-track tape in 1982, and those have been successfully read and a machine-readable index of their contents have been started.

Do you know anyone who may have worked for computer companies in the 60’s or 70’s that was a pack rat? The companies themselves have either disappeared or discarded this stuff literally decades ago!

This discovery has reinforced my opinion that there may still be large archives of 60’s and 70’s software in the hands of individuals, and that the most important thing to do is to get the word out that CHM is committed to the preservation of these archives, and has the facilities to recover these latent archives and keep them for posterity.

So if you are one of these people or you know one of them, please contact Al.

His manual collection also includes scanned copies of source code listings for some historic machines, including MIT’s Whirlwind and The University of Illionois’ ILLIAC I (scanned from hardcopies belonging to Wayne Lichtenberger).

Al notes that David Green is writing a simulator for the version of the ILLIAC built at the University of Sydney.

Updated TX-0 and PDP-1 URLs following a change at bitsavers.org.