John McCarthy developed the basics behind Lisp during the 1956 Dartmouth

Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence. He intended it as an

algebraic LISt Processing (hence the name) language for artificial

intelligence work. Early implementations included the IBM 704, the IBM

7090, the DEC PDP-1, the DEC PDP-6 and the DEC PDP-10. The PDP-6 and

PDP-10 had 18-bit addresses and 36-bit words, allowing a CONS cell to

be stored in one word, with single instructions to extract the CAR and

CDR parts. The early PDP machines had a small address space, which

limited the size of Lisp programs.

Milestones in the development of Lisp:

1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on AI.

1960-65 Lisp1.5 is the primary dialect of Lisp.

1964- Development of BBNLisp at BBN.

late 60s Lisp1.5 diverges into two main dialects:

Interlisp (originally BBNLisp) and MacLisp.

early 70s Development of special-purpose computers known as Lisp

Machines, designed specificly to run Lisp programs.

Xerox D-series Lisp Machines run Interlisp-D.

Early MIT Lisp Machines run Lisp Machine Lisp

(an extension of MacLisp).

1969 Anthony Hearn and Martin Griss define Standard Lisp to

port REDUCE, a symbolic algebra system, to a variety

of architectures.

late 70s Macsyma group at MIT developed NIL (New Implementation

of Lisp), a Lisp for the VAX.

Stanford and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

develop S-1 Lisp for the Mark IIA supercomputer.

Franz Lisp (dialect of MacLisp) runs on stock-hardware

Unix machines.

Gerald J. Sussman and Guy L. Steele developed Scheme,

a simple dialect of Lisp with lexical scoping and

lexical closures, continuations as first-class objects,

and a simplified syntax (i.e., only one binding per symbol).

Advent of object-oriented programming concepts in Lisp.

Flavors was developed at MIT for the Lisp machine,

and LOOPS (Lisp Object Oriented Programming System) was

developed at Xerox.

early 80s Development of SPICE-Lisp at CMU, a dialect of MacLisp

designed to run on the Scientific Personal Integrated

Computing Environment (SPICE) workstation.

1980 First biannual ACM Lisp and Functional Programming Conf.

1981 PSL (Portable Standard Lisp) runs on a variety of platforms.

1981+ Lisp Machines from Xerox, LMI (Lisp Machines Inc)

and Symbolics available commercially.

April 1981 Grass roots definition of Common Lisp as a description

of the common aspects of the family of languages (Lisp

Machine Lisp, MacLisp, NIL, S-1 Lisp, Spice Lisp, Scheme).

1984 Publication of CLtL1. Common Lisp becomes a de facto

standard.

1986 X3J13 forms to produce a draft for an ANSI Common Lisp

standard.

1987 Lisp Pointers commences publication.

1990 Steele publishes CLtL2 which offers a snapshot of

work in progress by X3J13. (Unlike CLtL1, CLtL2

was NOT an output of the standards process and was

not intended to become a de facto standard. Read

the Second Edition Preface for further explanation

of this important issue.) Includes CLOS,

conditions, pretty printing and iteration facilities.

1992 X3J13 creates a draft proposed American National

Standard for Common Lisp. This document is the

first official successor to CLtL1.

[Note: This summary is based primarily upon the History section of the

draft ANSI specification.