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 (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.

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!)

Update 9/22/2010: corrected URL for Whetstone at Software Preservation Group website.

The ALGOL 58/60 implementations for which I’ve been able to find source code for include:

• Burroughs 205 (Knuth)
• Burroughs 220 (Erdwinn et al.)
• Burroughs B-5500
• DEC PDP-10 (Habermann et al.)
• Electrologica X1 (Dijkstra and Zonneveld – Mathematisch Centrum)
• Electrologica X8 (Kruseman Aretz – Mathematisch Centrum)
• Electrologica X8 (Bron et al. – Technische Hogeschool Eindhoven)
• Elliot 803 (Hoare et al.)
• English Electric Whetstone (Randell and Russell)
• G.E.C. process control computer (Higman)
• Regnecentralen GIER (Naur et al.)
• Stantec Zebra (van der Mey – Netherlands PTT)

The appendices to Maurice Halstead’s book Machine-Independent Programming (Spartan Books, 1962) contain compiler source listings of Neliac (an ALGOL 58 dialect) for the UNIVAC M-460, IBM 704, and CDC 1604.

I also found compiler source code and listings for several versions of ALGOL W.

I’ve just gotten started looking for ALGOL 68 implementations.

I welcome your comments, corrections, and suggestions for the ALGOL web site.

In a recent oral history I conducted for the Computer History Museum, Don put into context his work designing SQL in collaboration with Ray Boyce. Don described the pre-relational database management systems, Ted Codd’s development of the relational model, various implementation projects at IBM culminating in System R, which was the first RDBMS to support SQL. Don went on to describe other pioneering relational systems, including Ingres and Oracle. He also described his subsequent work on text processing, DB/2, and XQuery.

For further historical information about Don and his work, see:

• Burt Grad, Moderator. RDBMS Workshop: Technology Through 1983, Computer History Museum, June 12, 2007. http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/accession/102658267
• Donald D. Chamberlin, OH 329. Oral history interview by Philip L. Frana, 3 October 2001, San Jose, California. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. http://www.cbi.umn.edu/oh/display.phtml?id=317
• Paul McJones, editor. The 1995 SQL Reunion: People, Projects, and Politics. Technical Note 1997-018, Systems Research Center, Digital Equipment Corporation, August 1997.
  http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/SRC-TN-1997-018.html

The lecture was in the form of an interview by New York Times technology reporter John Markoff, who noted:

The Internet has many fathers, but few deserve the label more than Robert W. Taylor.

Authors M. Mitchell Waldrop (The Dream Machine) and Michael A. Hiltzik (Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age) shared their views as well. J Strother Moore and Gary Chapman (who each worked with Bob in the past and now have UT positions) served as masters of ceremony.

The announcement for the lecture includes links to news stories about Bob, as well as the famous 1968 paper by Licklider and Taylor, “The Computer as a Communication Device”. The recap of the lecture includes links to a video and photographs.

The article links to the Software Preservation Group FORTRAN web site and uses a photograph of John Backus and John Cocke from a souvenir matchbook cover from Capt. Starn’s Restaurant and Bar in Atlantic City, New Jersey, year unknown: