Month: December 2007

The Revised MacLisp Manual goes online

MIT’s MacLisp played a key role in Lisp history, but its documentation often lagged the system as developers concentrated on adding features and improving performance. Around the time that Lisp machine development eclipsed PDP-10 MacLisp, this final MacLisp document was published:

  • Kent M. Pitman. The Revised MacLisp Manual. “Saturday Morning Edition”, M.I.T. Laboratory for Computer Science Technical Report MIT-LCS-TR-295, June 1, 1983.

This has been out of print for many years, but Kent just made available an updated, hypertext “Sunday Morning Edition”.

If you are interested in more MacLisp history, including earlier manuals, source code, and more, see the MacLisp family of the Lisp website at the Computer History Museum.

Update 1/1/2016: Corrected URL for MacLisp family.

BBC Radio observes Fortran’s 50th birthday

This week’s episode of BBC Radio’s Digital Planet show includes a short segment on the 50th anniversary of Fortran. The presenter, Gareth Mitchell, interviewed me last week and about 4 minutes of that interview are included.


If you’re interested, the show will be broadcast at various times December 18 and 19 (today and tomorrow); local schedules are available at this web page:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cgi-bin/worldservice/psims/ScheduleSDT.cgi

For one week only, starting today, an MP3 of the entire half-hour show can be downloaded from this web page:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/digital_planet.shtml

The Fortran segment starts at about 19m38s into the show.

Update 2: With the permission of BBC Radio, I’ve added the audio of the Fortran segment to the Memoirs and user stories section of the CHM Fortran web site:

  • Gareth Mitchell, presenter. Fortran is 50. Digital Planet programme, BBC Radio World Service, December 18, 2007, 6′:40″. MP3 (7.6 megabytes)

    Mitchell interviews Paul McJones on the occasion of the 50th birthday of Fortran; additional commentary by Bill Thompson; produced by Helena Selby.


Update: A BBC reorganization removed the download link from the page above; in a comment below, Derek Mahar notes the episode download site is now http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/podcasts/digitalp/ and this download itself is http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/digitalp/digitalp_20071218-1232.mp3

Computer History Museum videos coming to YouTube

The Computer History Museum has just launched a partnership with YouTube to provide a ComputerHistory “channel”. Right now it has 23 videos from various events and lectures at the museum; if you subscribe (via the orange button), you’ll be notified when more are uploaded. In the mean time, the museum maintains a calendar of past events with links to video, where available.

Update 1/1/2016: Updated URL for CHM past events.