A celebration of the 50th anniversary of Lisp is taking place in October at OOPSLA 2008. John McCarthy will give a talk about the early history of Lisp. Also Guy Steele and Richard Gabriel will repeat their 1992 HOPL-II talk about the Evolution of Lisp.
Faithful readers of this blog know that a good way to prepare for this event is to visit the History of Lisp web site at the Computer History Museum, which contains source code, manuals, and hyperlinks for many versions of Lisp starting with McCarthy’s Lisp 1.5.
Update 6 (2024/05/08): Updated URLs for the HOPL II slides and paper.
Update 5 (2012/7/10): I updated the URLs for www.lisp50.org to use www.archive.org since the domain name seems to fallen into the hands of Japanese search engine optimizers, and I updated the hyperlink for JonL White because his ACM Author page now gives a 404 error.
Update 4: It was necessary to revise the schedule because of severe health issues preventing John McCarthy from attending in person. Pascal Costanza says McCarthy will be able to participate via live telephone interview.
Update 3: Now www.lisp50.org lists the Invited Speakers but notes “Title, abstracts, biographies and schedule will be announced here and at the Lisp50 blog in the coming days and weeks.”
Update 2: www.lisp50.org seems to be the URL for Lisp50@OOPSLA, but the Invited Speakers section still says “to be announced”.
Update 1: JonL White notes that the Association of Lisp Users is holding its “celebratory 50th Anniversary” conference at MIT in the spring of 2009, with Guy Steele as Program Chair and Dan Weinreb as General Chair; Dan sent out an “extremely unofficial pre-announcement” in February.