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<div dir="ltr">Jeremy,</div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">Sorry to hear that your memory is failing. Thank you for sharing what you remember.</div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">I remember rewriting the 6805 RAM for the Atari Star Wars Machine to implement Turtle graphics for that screen, and writing 3D Turtle Graphics for the Symbolics Lisp Machine. Both at the Atari Cambridge Research Lab, in 1984.</div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">I remember Jeremy giving me a 1 megabyte floppy, around 1988, plugging it into my Mac Plus, and being amazed that there was a real Common Lisp that ran on that little toy computer.</div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">I remember expanding Gail’s CLOS beginnings to a full implementation, and am sad that Gregor’s Art of the MetaObject Protocol book was not yet available in 1990, or MCL and CCL would have a complete MOP today.</div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">I remember helping the Dylan team with WOOD (William’s Object-Oriented Database, a persistent heap), to store compiler products, and general MCL maintenance. Our layoff party, in October of 2015, featuring Halloween colors and snacks of Apple turnovers, sticks in my memory.</div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">I remember helping, at Digitool, with the port of MCL from 68000 to PowerPC, and writing the C code to implement segmented stacks. I think I left Digitool just before the financial break-down, so, unlike Alice and Gary, Hakim didn’t owe me any money.</div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">Clozure provided interesting work for the last 14 years of my working life (2006-2020), writing application software in CCL. Thank you to all, Jeremy, Andrew, Gary, Gail, Gary Palter, Matt.</div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><div dir="ltr">Bill St. Clair</div>
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<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Jul 21, 2024 at 11:32:02 AM, Jeremy Jones <<a href="mailto:jaj@pobox.com">jaj@pobox.com</a>> wrote:<br></div>
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<div dir="auto"><div dir="auto">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.</div><div dir="auto">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. </div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">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. </div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">‐--------</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">A personal outline of the history of Coral Common Lisp</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">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. </div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">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.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">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.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">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.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">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. </div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">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.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">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.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">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.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Gary continued working on OpenMCL for JPL and Sandia. OpenMCL was used on space probes! Ron Garrett has told this story. </div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">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.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">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.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">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!</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Jeremy </div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div></div></div>
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