[Openmcl-devel] CLIM2 on CCL

[Ron Garret]

On Jul 26, 2016, at 7:02 AM, Rainer Joswig <joswig at lisp.de> wrote:

>> I’ve actually looked around to try to find out who owns the Digitool intellectual property, with the goal of getting earlier releases of MCL distributable (as well as any sources for them that may still exist), but I haven’t been able to find much.
>> 
>> Heck, even the pre-5.2 source repository for MCL is lost now, unless someone can engage with Google to recover it, or unless someone managed to grab it using git-svn before Google Code closed down. (Since the svn repo wasn’t converted to hg, but kept in place as a new hg repository was created for 5.2+, only the hg repo is downloadable from the Google Code Archive site. Better than nothing, especially since it still has the Fred code, but I was hoping for history too…)
> 
> Though it might be historically interesting, much of that stuff is of very little use today. The old MCL code only runs on outdated computers, under outdated operating systems and outdated libraries.

IMHO, dismissing the old MCL sources as “merely” a loss to history misses an important point: the original Coral Common Lisp was an incredible technological achievement.  It ran a full Common Lisp, plus an IDE that is still better than much of what is available today over thirty years later.  It fit on three 800k floppy disks and ran on a computer with 1 MB of RAM.  Nothing contemporary even comes close to having that ratio of features to footprint.  CCL (the original Coral Common Common Lisp) is important not just because it’s nostalgic, but because building things like that seems to have become a lost art.  There’s interesting technology there that has been lost.

rg