P.S. I can’t find a listing for the book at www.pearson.co.kr; I will update this post and our book website if I hear of one.

I’d like to announce the return of a very useful Algol 68 resource: a scanned copy of Informal Introduction to Algol 68, posted by permission of coauthor Charles H. Lindsey and copyright holder IFIP. This is the revised 1980 reprint of the second (“completely revised”) edition of 1977. For convenience, I’ve also posted separate files containing the large fold-out Table of Contents and the appendix of Syntax Charts.

This book, together with Marcel van der Veer’s modern Algol 68 Genie implementation and the extensive documentation accompanying it (including a hypertext version of the Revised Report) provide an excellent way to study Algol 68.

In addition to the above-mentioned, a number of other people have contributed to the overall Algol archive project. I’d like to single out Neville Dempsey for his dedication to spreading knowledge of and appreciation for Algol 68.

This was of course the first book on LISP. It is a reference manual rather than a textbook, but many people managed to learn LISP from it, and a number of people managed to implement LISP from it. Today ACM’s Digital Library lists 327 citations for it, and Google lists about 23,900 hits. I’m pleased to say that #1 on Google is the authorized PDF at my History of LISP archive at the Computer History Museum.

Through the generosity of several people, the History of LISP archive includes not only the book but also several versions of the underlying source code:

• LISP 1.5 Programmer’s Manual by permission of MIT Press;
• September 1961 snapshot of the source code in PDF and ASCII formats, courtesy of Timothy P. Hart, M.I.T. Museum, Jack Harper, Pascal Bourguignon, Rich Cornwell and Bob Abeles;
• Snapshot of CTSS version of source code, courtesy of Robert R. Fenichel;
• Snapshot of SHARE distribution of source code, courtesy of Dennis Allison and Al Kossow.

If you’re resourceful and you’d like to actually run the system described in this book, you don’t need an IBM 7090 or a time machine; the SIMH simulator package and the files and information here are sufficient; scroll down until you find “Running Lisp 1.5 in the SIMH IBM 7094 emulator.”

In 2008, McIntosh wrote:[3]

My first experience with LISP was while working for the Martin Company in Baltimore, Maryland.[4] The Massachussetts Institute of Technology had an “Industrial Liaison Program,” to a session of which I was sent to hear a presentation on this new symbolic programming language by members of their Artificial Intelligence group. That was the famous meeting which was interrupted by a garbage collection, visible via a remote monitor connected to the computer room.

We heard about climbing “gradients in theorem space” as a way to prove theorems and saw a demonstration of the computation of a symbolic derivative and afterwards I was assured by a friend who worked in the group that it was even possible to compute gradients of functions of several variables. Returning to Baltimore, I was disenchanted by the whole episode but on reporting the experience to the director of the computer center, his reaction was “I want one of those!” So, it was back to MIT to cajole a copy of the tape from my friend, and learn how to use it. A copy of the user’s manual for Lisp 1.5 was available[5], as well as a published description of the language in Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery.[1] Part of the learning process was to write a Lisp processor of my own in the assembly language of the IBM 709 (later 7090), which was christened MBLISP[6], computing center projects being required to have a name. MB was the Share code for “Martin Baltimore.”

During the time that MBLISP was under development there were some prospective applications — computing group character tables, transforming quantum mechanical Slater integrals to take advantage of their symmetry, even getting representations of the Lie group SU(3) which were needed in nuclear physics. Slater himself at MIT already had a program called Shadow, but using a symbolic language seemed as though it might be an improvement. In any event, the combination of having applications and writing the processor made one quite aware of both the favorable and unfavorable aspects of LISP, both as a language and in its implementation as an operating system.

In addition to using Lisp for his own work, McIntosh immediately began introducing it to students. In 1963 he wrote:[7]

In a summer institute conducted by RIAS at the campus of Morgan State College in Baltimore, in July and August of 1961, a dozen students ranging in age from 17 to 23 and in educational level from high school to college graduate, studied programming for an IBM 7090 computer and “programming languages” which are designed to handle particular types of problems. The experience of this institute shows that students can be introduced directly to that class of computers which we have arbitrarily designated as large, as well as how this study may supplement mathematical training of the more customary sort.

The students at this institute and ones the next two summers at the Quantum Theory Project of the University of Florida, Gainesville, investigated a variety of topics, from puzzles to flexagons to group theory, and wrote a series of reports on MBLISP and its applications.[6]

After two years at the University of Florida, McIntosh accepted an offer at CENAC (Centro Nacional de Calculo, Instituto Politecnico Nacional) in Mexico. Robert Yates, one of the students who’d attended the Baltimore and Florida summer institutes, recently told me:[8]

… Mac’s connection with Mexico started with Marcos Moshinsky – for years Mexico’s best theoretical physicist… Moshinsky was interested in group theory – SU3 in particular and he had these creation/annihilation operators that did not commute. [A, B] = AB – BA = I. All of the blackboards of the Physics Institute were filled up with polynomials of As and Bs – the algebra is tedious to say the least. Mac told Moshinsky that LISP could do the algebra and Moshinsky was interested.

Yates visited Mexico several times, and spent the 1963-1964 academic year there before returning to Johns Hopkins to finish his bachelor’s degree. It was during this visit that Yates helped organize the First International Lisp Conference.

Lowell Hawkinson was also introduced to Lisp by Harold McIntosh:[9]

One of the students who had attended McIntosh’s 1961 Lisp summer school was Peter Conrad, my sophomore year roommate at Yale. Through this connection, I ended up attending McIntosh’s 1962 offering in Gainesville, probably funded entirely out of his own pocket. In preparation for this, I read a primer on Lisp that he and his students had written a year or two earlier[10], and then I began writing simple recursive Lisp functions for set-theoretic operations — before I had ever seen other than a picture of a computer.

During the next academic year at Yale, I built a Lisp interpreter, YULISP, for the IBM 709. Among other things, it had a rather sophisticated relocating garbage collector, perhaps the first instance of this kind of garbage collector. I also began work on a compiler version of YULISP. (All this was much to the detriment of my academic studies.)

I spent August of 1963 at Uppsala University as a guest of Prof. Per-Olov Lowdin, a quantum theorist, mathematician, and friend of Harold McIntosh. The central event of this visit was a talk on Lisp I presented in a grand old lecture hall at the university. At age 20, I was rather ill-prepared to deliver such a public lecture, but perhaps I planted a seed or two of interest in one or two Swedes.

Over the next couple of years, I continued to work under the mentorship of Harold McIntosh, first at the University of Florida in Gainesville and then at the Instituto Politecnico Nacional in Mexico City (where Adolfo Guzmán was a student and where Bob Yates was also to be found). At the Instituto Politecnico, I taught Lisp and continued implementing Lisps, both the YULISP compiler version for the IBM 709 and a just-for-fun interpreter for the CDC 160-A, a tiny paper tape machine.

Yates supplied some additional detail:[8]

Hawkinson & Yates LISP. While I was in Mexico City (September 1963 – September 1964), I had the opportunity to work with Lowell and become familiar with his plans for his next LISP version (again for the IBM 7090). The extensions consisted in incorporating integers, floating point numbers and arrays as basic objects (like atoms and lists) in the LISP language in a very efficient manner and this LISP was a compiler instead of an interpreter which made it much faster still. Towards the middle of 1964, we worked together and got the compiler running on the IBM 709 at the Politecnico. I went back to finish my bachelor’s degree at Johns Hopkins and Lowell remained 7-8 months more and was able to finish the garbage collector (which collected both lists and arrays — an innovation at that time). Lowell sent me a card deck and I continued work on the compiler at Bell Labs (Holmdel). However, Bell Labs wanted me to do the garbage collector for their Snobol4 project (Griswold) and then I went to Stanford for my doctorate. I essentially abandoned the Hawkinson-Yates LISP system and never had any more contact with it.

While earning his doctorate at Stanford, Yates worked at Stanford Research Institute (now called SRI International) on theorem proving and its applications to question-answering, problem-solving, etc. — the language QA4 was an outcome. Later he returned to Mexico where he was at the Universidad National Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM) for many years, including Centro de Investigacion en Matemáticas Aplicadas y en Sistemas (CIMAS) and Instítuto de Geofisica. He is currently with the firm Alternativas en Computación.

Hawkinson’s career next took him to Information International, Inc. and the LISP 2 project, which I hope to take up in a later posting.

Hawkinson mentioned Adolfo Guzmán: a Mexican engineer who worked with McIntosh at Instituto Politecnico Nacional and wrote his undergraduate dissertation[11] on an interpreter for CONVERT, a pattern-matching language he designed with McIntosh. In a paper on CONVERT, Guzmán and McIntosh noted:[12]

The first version was written in MBLISP, a LISP dialect which differs from LISP in a number of technical details, but which had a sufficient amount of pushdown list and free storage space available to be able to execute reasonably complicated examples. As an interpreter–interpreting a CONVERT interpreter for a slow machine–it was decidedly slow. The Q-32 version using a faster machine with a Lisp compiler gave a much better performance. One of the programs analyzed a group of order 16, defined as a semi-direct product C8:C2 of cyclic groups of order 8 and 2, respectively. It was possible to obtain the group table in about three minutes at times when the time-sharing competition was not intense which meant about a second per group product, a figure several hundred times as fast as for MBLISP in the 709.

The Q-32 Lisp has a limited pushdown list available, which prevented the execution of quite a number of programs, since CONVERT is highly recursive. However, the latest experience has been with yet another LISP processor, a compiler, constructed for the CENAC by Lowell Hawkinson and Robert Yates, and which they are presumably continuing to develop. It is unique in having an excellent array and floating-point numerical capability, as well as being very carefully organized in all other aspects. As a result it is one of our current vehicles for the CONVERT programs.

Guzmán Arenas went on to earn a master’s degree and PhD at MIT with Marvin Minsky as his advisor. He has had a long and productive career in Mexico and the United States.

McIntosh stayed in Mexico, working in various positions at Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Instituto Nacional de Energía Nuclear, and finally Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. He has advised many graduate students, created widely-used software packages, and published several books — see here for a summary.

Update 7/10/2012: McIntosh comments: “It might be of interest that Gerardo Cisneros and Carlos Bunge later on considerably extended the Slater integral programs; as I recall this included using CONVERT. REC and CONVERT were my answers to perceived shortcomings in LISP.”

Incidentally, Cisneros wrote “La computación en México y la influencia de H. V. Mcintosh en su desarrollo” in 1991.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Harold McIntosh, Robert Yates, Lowell Hawkinson, and Adolfo Guzmán Arenas for sharing their stories with me. Thanks to Harold McIntosh, Robert Yates, and Adolfo Guzmán Arenas, and Herbert Stoyan for making available documents. And thanks to Steve Russell for encouraging me to contact Harold McIntosh.

References

[1] John McCarthy. Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I. CACM Vol. 3, No. 4, April 1960, pages 184-195. ACM Digital Library Online at stanford.edu

[2] J. McCarthy, R. Brayton, D. Edwards, P. Fox, L. Hodes, D. Luckham, K. Maling, D. Park and S. Russell. LISP I Programmer’s Manual. Computation Center and Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, March 1, 1960. PDF at bitsavers.org

[3] H. V. McIntosh. 2008: An anniversary. Posting to Cellular automata miscellanea forum, October 17, 2008. Retrieved from Google cache of http://cellular.ci.ulsa.mx/miscelanea/viewtopic.php?t=99&view=next& sid=7d8412cce26816e74caae70f1afb9a25 August 14, 2010.

[4] McIntosh worked at RIAS, the Research Institute for Advanced Studies, a subsidiary of The Martin Company, in Baltimore, Maryland.

[5] John McCarthy, Paul W. Abrahams, Daniel J. Edwards, Timothy P. Hart, Michael I. Levin. Lisp 1.5 Programmer’s Manual. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1962.. online at softwarepreservation.org

[6] Paul McJones, editor. History of Lisp : Other Lisp 1.5 implementations : MBLISP. online at softwarepreservation.org

[7] Harold V. McIntosh. An Experiment in Teaching the Use of Large Electronic Computers. The American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 70, No. 2 (February 1963), pages 207-209. online at jstor.org

[8] Robert Yates, personal communications, August 14 and September 28, 2010.

[9] Lowell Hawkinson, personal communication, April 7, 2010.

[10] William Skeen, Judy Barnes, John D. Baildon, and Robert Thompson. Handbook of LISP Functions. RIAS Technical Report 61-11, RIAS Martin Baltimore, August 1961. PDF at softwarepreservation.org

[11] Adolfo Guzmán Arenas. CONVERT. Diseño de un lenguaje para manipulación simbólica de datos, y de su procesador correspondiente. Tesis de licenciatura, en español. ESIME-IPN, 1965. online at ipn.academia.edu

[12] Adolfo Guzmán and Harold V. McIntosh. CONVERT. CACM Vol. 9, No. 8, August 1966, pages 604-615. ACM Digital Library Online at dspace.mit.edu

I recently wrote a summary of Jim’s life and career for the updated ACM Turing Award web site; it includes links to related articles from the 2008 Tribute held for him at U.C. Berkeley and also photographs supplied by Donna.

Here I’ll note a few of my personal memories of working with Jim, who I met at the University of California in the the late 1960s, when he was a computer science graduate student, and I was an engineering undergraduate and part-time employee of the campus computer center. Jim served as an informal advisor to me on course work, and he was also my manager for a time on the CAL Timesharing System project. Jim was a knowledgeable, patient and enthusiastic advisor. There were few boundaries between Jim’s professional and social life. I will never forget going walnut picking with Jim, who stood on the roof of his VW bus to reach the walnuts, and then easily repaired the dent in the roof by pushing upward from below.

Jim and I worked together again a few years later at IBM San Jose Research (now IBM Almaden). After working with John Backus (whom Jim had introduced me to) on functional programming for about 15 months, I joined Jim on the System R team. By then Jim was well into his work on the transaction abstraction — creating a unified approach to the interrelated problems of concurrency control and crash recovery — which led to his 1998 ACM Turing Award. I took over some of the transaction management code, designed the crash recovery component, and wrote a multiprocess debugger which we used to test and debug the lock manager. As always, Jim was an enthusiastic and generous collaborator; I’m very proud of being a coauthor with him and six of our System R colleagues of the paper “The Recovery Manager of the System R Database Manager”.

I don’t suppose I’ll ever stop encountering subjects causing me to say to myself, “If only I could talk to Jim about this.”

Sergio F. Beltrán founded the Centro de Calculo at UNAM in the late 1950s, starting with an IBM 650. He organized a series of annual conferences on applications of computers, and for the third conference he thought it would be interesting to hear about the programming language Lisp. Robert Yates was an American undergraduate enrolled at Johns Hopkins but spending the 1963-1964 academic year at UNAM. In a recent email, Yates told me:

[Beltrán] asked me to write letters to McCarthy, Perlis and Newell inviting them to Mexico City in December 1963. [Harold V.] McIntosh was living in Mexico at that time. McCarthy accepted and brought Marvin Minsky and a group of graduate students including Steve Russell and [Tim] Hart. The conference lasted about a week; there were about 12-15 presentations given. For me it was great because of the opportunity to meet McCarthy, Minsky and Russell.

It turns out the Herbert Stoyan collection on LISP programming includes a one-page preliminary list of participants and papers with Beltrán’s initials. Some of the talks were written up and published in other forums; here is my attempt at a “virtual proceedings”.

A major topic was talks by members of the MIT AI project about Lisp implementation:

• Daniel Edwards: Secondary Storage in Lisp.
• Thomas Evans: Character string manipulation in Lisp. (no paper?)
• Timothy Hart: MACRO Definitions for Lisp.
• Michael Levin: Algebraic Compiler with LISP. Perhaps related to: Hart and Levin: The New Compiler.
• Marvin Minsky: A LISP Garbage Collector Algorithm Using Serial Secondary Storage.
• Steve Russell: Debugging aids.

John McCarthy was to give a talk on “The LISP 2 compiler”. LISP 2 was an ambitious but ill-fated project getting started around this time, which deserves its own posting. Suffice it to say it was completely compiler-based; expressions could still be typed in from a READ-EVAL-PRINT loop, but were compiled in an appropriate environment, executed, and discarded. See the LISP 2 section of the CHM History of LISP web site.

Beltrán was interested in applications of computers, and the applications at this first Lisp conference mostly involved what is now known as computer algebra: solving equations algebraically (symbolically) rather than numerically. This topic included:

• Dean Wooldridge: An Algebraic Simplify Program in LISP.
• Anthony C. Hearn: LISP. Computation of Feyman Graphs. Perhaps similar to: Campbell and Hearn: Symbolic analysis of Feynman diagrams by computer, Journal of Computational Physics Volume 5, Issue 2, April 1970, Pages 280–327.
• Victor Dulock (LISP. Applications to Symmetric groups, Dirac groups and Lie algebras), Lowell Hawkinson (Data structures and arrangements), Billy S. Thomas (Use of arrays in LISP. Group theory programs), and Robert Yates (LISP. Group analysis programs. Lambda Lisp. Compiler for a variable word machine (Gamma 30 Scientific)) were colleagues or students of Harold V. McIntosh (The use of operator predicates in LISP). McIntosh was a mathematical physicist who began his career at RIAS, a research subsidiary of Martin Aircraft in Baltimore, Maryland, and then spent 1962-1963 at the Quantum Theory Project at the University of Florida before accepting a position at Centro Nacional de Calculo, Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Mexico. A flavor of the talks from this group may be obtained from the documents in the MBLISP section of the History of Lisp web site, and also perhaps from this later paper: Adarsh Deepak, Victor Dulock, Billy S. Thomas and Harold V. McIntosh: Symmetry Adapted Functions Belonging to the Dirac Groups. International Journal of Quantum Chemistry, 3 445-483 (1969).

There were a few other speakers in Beltrán’s preliminary list:

• Joseph Weizenbaum: Open ended compilation. Weizenbaum had been at General Electric for a number of years, and had published papers on list processing including his Symmetric List Processor (SLIP) system. In 1964, he accepted a position at MIT.
• Joseph Williams: A Lisp page plotter.
• Verhovsky: Fns analoguous and similar.

I’ll update this post if I hear more from any of the attendees of this historic conference.

Update 7/10/2012: While working on the later post “Harold V. McIntosh and his students: Lisp escapes MIT”, I realized that the last entry of the preliminary list of papers, “Verhovsky: Fns analoguous and similar”, probably referred to Alberto Verjovsky’s “Two LISP pattern recognition functions: SIMILAR and SIMILAR*” (Program Note #2, Quantum Theory Project, University of Florida, February 28, 1963). I was able to get in touch with Alberto, who confirmed this and noted, “I gave a small presentation in front of several people like McIntosh, Minsky, McCarthy, amongst others. I was 19 years old and was not aware of the importance of these people.”

Update 5/1/2012: Tony Hearn notes that the handwriting on the preliminary list of participants and papers is his own; he probably gave it to Herbert Stoyan one of the times he visited Stoyan in Dresden in the 1970s.

• Edgar G. Daylight. From Mathematical Logic to Programming-Language Semantics — a Discussion with Tony Hoare. Journal of Logic and Computation (to appear).
  

  Section 2.3 covers Hoare’s Algol work at Elliot.

• Edgar G. Daylight. Pluralism in Software Engineering: Turing Award Winner Peter Naur Explains. CONVERSATIONS. Issue 1, Volume 2011, Lonely Scholar, 2011.
  

  Part I of this wide-ranging interview covers Naur’s work on Algol 60, including the DASK and GIER implementations. He also makes a few remarks about Algol 68.

• Pierre Mounier-Kuhn. From universal project to sunken culture : Algol in France. SHOT / SIGCIS Workshop 2011, Cultures and Communities in the History of Computing, Cleveland (OH), 6th November 2011. PDF

• Edgar G. Daylight. Dijkstra’s Rallying Cry for Generalization: The Advent of the Recursive Procedure, Late 1950s–Early 1960s.
  • The Computer Journal, Advance access, March 8, 2011. Oxford Journals
  • Peer-reviewed and edited preprint at dijkstrascry.com. HTML PDF

In a section on Future Work near the end of the paper, Daylight notes, “Research contributions of Gödel, Carnap, Turing and Tarski have been studied and documented over and over again by logicians and philosophers themselves. Computer scientists, by contrast, have yet to commence with similar work concerning the ideas of their fathers: Dijkstra, McCarthy, Hoare and others. This, in turn, explains my motivation to write this paper.” Daylight, who is a post-doctorate researcher in the history of computing, has set up the blog-style web site Dijkstra’s Rallying Cry for Generalization as a way to report on his ongoing research into Dijkstra’s writings, including the E. W. Dijkstra Archive at the University of Texas and additional materials Dijkstra’s family donated. Daylight is off to a good start. He welcomes suggestions for improving his blog, and notes he’ll be adding photographs of Dijkstra soon.

In that spirit, I offer the following photograph, taken at the 1973 Marktoberdorf Summer School, of instructor Dijkstra and student McJones. Dijkstra’s subsequent trip report (EWD385) mentions my friend Dave Redell (who took the photograph) and me because we served as “intelligent terminals” in an “interactive programming session”.

It was only recently, Bell notes, that “Software was finally added to list of things collected, such as the history of FORTRAN including original source code.” The FORTRAN collection to which Gordon refers is here; a catalog search of FORTRAN-related items in the museum’s archives is available here.

Bell gives a list of some two dozen “Mona Lisas” in the collection, all hardware artifacts. He concludes this section by saying “Regrettably, I omit that hard to see, hard to describe, essential software from COBOL, FORTRAN, and LISP, various Operating Systems, and on through Visicalc, and the Relational database.” I strongly agree with Bell about the importance of collecting and displaying such historic software. I’m glad to be able to point the previously-mentioned FORTRAN collection, and to similar collections for LISP, ALGOL, and C++. Others have assembled extensive collections on, for example, the Multics and Unix operating systems, PDP-10 systems and applications, and many more. Two of the earliest relational database management systems, Berkeley Ingres and IBM System R, have been preserved but are not yet easily accessible. For the most part, these collections are aimed at a more scholarly audience; I hope they will serve as source materials for future exhibits for a wider audience.

Thanks again to the many people down through the years who have patiently answered my questions, supplied copies of source code and documents, and allowed me to post copies.

Update 7/11/2012: The video made its way to YouTube and iTunes. By the way, the abstract (with a link to the slides) is here.

For a number of years Bob has been involved in volunteer activities at the Computer History Museum, and recently he organized his thoughts on how museums can use the web to present technology, in the form of this article: “Museums in the Computer Age: meeting the challenge of technology“. Bob invites comments on the article via email at bobpatrick@mac.com.

The host computer for the Lisp 2 project was the AN/FSQ-32/V, a one-of-a-kind prototype built by IBM for the Air Force as a potential replacements for the SAGE AN/FSQ-7. Before the Lisp 2 project began, an innovative compiler-only implementation of Lisp 1.5 on the Q-32 was done by Robert Saunders and his colleagues.

Through the kindness of Jeff Barnett, who was one of central contributors at SDC, the History of LISP web site now includes scanned copies of the Lisp 2 source code (with annotations by Jeff) and a number of documents, including the complete TM-3417 series documenting a planned (but not completed) port to the IBM System/360. A few other early memos were previously available online as MIT Project Mac memos. Additional memos will be soon be available via the Stoyan collection.

After the Lisp 2 project was terminated, the Q-32 at SDC was replaced with an IBM System/360. The researchers still wanted to use Lisp, so Jeff Barnett and Bob Long implemented a Lisp 1.5 for the System/360. Again, Jeff loaned a copy of the original manual and also wrote new notes.

Speech understanding was a major research area for many people at SDC, including Jeff. As building blocks for the speech research, he worked on two more Lisp or Lisp-like systems:

1. A small Lisp for the Raytheon 704 used for speech capture and low-level processing.
2. The Crisp Lisp 2-like system for the IBM System/370.

Jeff has provided modern notes for both, and for Crisp both the original documentation as well as slides from a recent talk he gave.

Finally, another offshoot of the Lisp 2 project is the book LISP 1.5 Primer by Clark Weissman. It began as a tutorial to help SDC researchers learn Lisp, and in 1967 was published as a book by Dickenson Publishing Company, Inc., of Belmont, California. The book has long been out of print and the copyright reverted to Clark; he has given his permission for a PDF of the book to be posted on the History of LISP web site.

Update 11/26/2010: Updated URLs to reflect reorganization of http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/.

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!)