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

[Tim Bradshaw]

Thank you for writing this: these personal histories of things are really valuable, I think.

--tim

> On 21 Jul 2024, at 16:32, Jeremy Jones <jaj at pobox.com> wrote:
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> 
> 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
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> 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. 
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> 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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