[Openmcl-devel] A personal outline of the history of Coral Common Lisp

[Jeremy Jones]

Disclaimer: This is an outline of the history of CCL only.  There is a lot
of important history missing because I wanted to focus on CCL. I've also
written more about the early years because it is less well known.
TONS of details and people have been left out. I've left out descriptions
of things like ObjectLisp and Qlogo, because I wanted to keep it short and
there's Google.

This is written from a failing memory, so please send me any corrections
and suggestions.  I apologize in advance for leaving people out and getting
things wrong. If anyone wants a more detailed history and/or wants to help,
let me know. After feedback and corrections, I'll probably turn this into a
Medium article.

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A personal outline of the history of Coral Common Lisp


I was hired by the Atari Cambridge Research Lab in 9/83 to write a compiler
for Qlogo. They gave me a Symbolics 3600 and told me to model the compiler
on Guy Steele's Rabbit compiler.

The Atari lab closed in 4/84. I was one of three founders of Coral
Software, along with Steve Hain and Glenn Forrester in 9/84. Glenn handled
the business while Steve and I did the hacking.  Steve wrote the initial
runtime and I ported the Qlogo compiler to C for the Macintosh.

I was friends with Gary Byers while we both attended The Evergreen State
College. I convinced him to become Coral's first employee in 1/85. A month
or two later we hired Chris Fry and Gail Zacharias.

The technical team consisted of myself,  Steve, Gary, Gail, and Fry. We
focused for two and a half years to produce Object Logo and CCL 1.0. We all
contributed to all parts of the system but Gary took over the compiler,
Steve the GC and runtime,  Gail the editor Fred (Fred Resembles EMACS
Deliberately) and the Common Lisp Reader (written largely in LAP, Lisp
Assembler Programming!), Fry filled out Common Lisp functionality and did
QA, I did the IDE and the integration with Mac toolbox.

CCL would have totally failed if it wasn't for the non-technical people at
Coral.  Glenn for raising money, buying the house we used as an office, and
paying the bills.  Andrew Shalit for the excellent documentation.  Phillipe
Krakowski for marketing. Susan and Adrian,  administrative assistants and
others I've forgotten.  At its peak I think Coral was eleven people.

CCL 1.0 was released in 6/87. It was a complete implementation of CLtL1 and
included an IDE and ObjectLisp. It ran on 512k Macs. (It was actually
called Macintosh Allegro Common Lisp because of a misguided marketing deal
with Franz.) It was an incredible product, acquired many fans, and won
awards. It kicked ass.

Apple acquired Coral in 12/88 and changed the name of CCL to Macintosh
Common Lisp (MCL). Apple hired Bill St Clair and Alice Hartley to continue
working on MCL. Gary, Bill, and Alice continued working on MCL while the
rest of us worked on Dylan.

Apple spun off MCL to Digitool in the early 90s. Gary, Bill, and Alice
continued to work on MCL at Digitool. Digitool failed as a business and
owed Gary, Bill, and Alice a lot of back salary. Gary made a deal with
Digitool to open source the non IDE portions of MCL in return for forgiving
the debt. This became OpenMCL.

Gary continued working on OpenMCL for JPL and Sandia. OpenMCL was used on
space probes! Ron Garrett has told this story.

Gary, Gail, and I founded Clozure Associates in 2001. Clozure took over
OpenMCL and renamed it to Clozure Common Lisp.  Lots of stuff happened to
CCL in the 2000s including ports to Intel and ARM, an excellent Cocoa
bridge, and an IDE for Cocoa. Matt Emerson joined Clozure and ported CCL to
Intel32.

In the 2010s, I left Clozure,  Gary and Gail retired. Clozure officially
disbanded as a company in 2022 I think. I have a deep appreciation for Matt
and the others who are keeping CCL alive.

Finally I want to say that it has been an honor and a privilege to work
with these amazing people for so many years. Thank you!

Jeremy
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