[Openmcl-devel] talk on CCL

[Chris Hanson]

As someone who’s studied their history, I seriously think that CCL/MCL is an under-acknowledged participant in the death of Lisp Machines: When you could use a Macintosh for development nearly as effectively as a Lisp Machine for barely a tenth the cost (or even less), and deploy on Macintosh as well, why spend all that money on specialized hardware? Especially since by the 1990s the Lisp Machines were falling far behind on performance.

  -- Chris

> On Oct 19, 2018, at 8:55 AM, Ron Garret <ron at flownet.com> wrote:
> 
> " an intrepid band of hackers formed a little company called Coral Software. And Coral Common Lisp was their product that they managed to put together, and it came out in 1987, and … they had a Common Lisp (it didn’t have CLOS, so it was CLTL1), [which] ran on a 1MB Macintosh Plus, this incredibly weak hardware. So that was a real accomplishment.”
> 
> Not only did they have a CL that ran on a 1MB Mac Plus, it had an IDE!  And not only did it have an IDE, it had one of the best IDEs ever.  You can still run it on emulators today, and it is still usable — even competitive — today.  It had an interactive interface builder that is still to this day superior to anything I have seen anywhere.  I still miss it.  (I used the original CCL to do my masters thesis back in 1987 and it spoiled me on IDEs for life.  I’ve been a grumpy old man ever since.)
> 
> I would rank the original CCL as a technical achievement on a par with the Macintosh itself.
> 
> rg
> 
> 
> On Oct 18, 2018, at 5:12 PM, R. Matthew Emerson <rme at acm.org> wrote:
> 
>> I was invited to give a talk at this year’s European Lisp Symposium in Marbella, Spain.  It was a great conference.  I highly recommend that you try to attend next the next one if you possibly can.  It will be in Genoa, Italy.  See https://european-lisp-symposium.org.
>> 
>> Anyway, I prepared a web site that contains a video of the talk and also a written transcript with slides included in the text in the appropriate places.
>> 
>> The link is http://thisoldlisp.com/talks/els-2018/
>> 
>> It’s not really very technical in nature (it’s meant to be entertaining and encouraging), but maybe some of you would enjoy it.
>> 
>> 
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