5 ms·
The History of Franz and Lisp
- pxeger1 5y agoNot to be confused with Franz Liszt
- usr1106 5y agoI used Franz Lisp on our student VAX 11/750 at university, maybe in 1985. I have no idea what kind of license the university had and how much they had paid for it. That wasn't a question you would ask yourself those days, all computers were worth millions. Around those days the university also bought a Symbolics. But its capacity was well below the VAX so students didn't get to use it without working on any very specific project in just that Lisp group.
- rjsw 5y agoOriginal Franz Lisp was open source, your university could just download it from UCB. I ported it to the Atari ST around that time.
- usr1106 5y agoDownload in 1985? Doesn't sound too likely. I remember using internet at the university in 1989. Maybe employees had access a bit earlier. But I doubt 4 years. I used Bitnet in 1987, but that was elsewhere, to my understanding our university never had it or only later when various networks/protocols got more interconnected. Sounds more like they ordered a tape or some employee brought it from a trip to a conference.
- rjsw 5y agoThe distribution could be sent in parts by email if you didn't have FTP access. In the UK, you could connect via JANET to an ARPANET gateway at University College London to FTP stuff from the US, this was before 1985. The franz-friends mailing list is probably archived somewhere with regular messages describing how to get the distribution.
- housel 5y agoAt that point it was probably the free Franz Lisp that was included in BSD Unix 4.2 or 4.3, which had an interpreter and compiler (with basically MACLISP semantics so it could run Macsyma) on VAX and mc68k platforms. As an undergraduate in 1986 I ported it to the CCI Tahoe, which was a VAX clone with a slightly simplified instruction set (and the main platform on which the BSD 4.3Tahoe release was developed).
- agumonkey 5y agoDidn't know about SDC/III Lisp 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LISP_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LISP_2 - http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/lisp2_family/#LISP_2_ http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/lisp2_fami...
- pmcjones 5y agoI think Fenaughty must have been involved with a much later project: the LISP 2 project at SDC (with III) started in 1963.
- mark_l_watson 5y agoThat was a fun read. Franz is a good company. My consulting customer a while back also hired them for a while - really smart people. Jans Aasman, mentioned in the interview, gave me funding to write a book that was partially on AllegroGraph (that book, very indirectly, led to my being invited to work on a knowledge graph project at Google). For those interested, I recommend downloading the free version of AllegroGraph as a docker image, and the free version of their Common Lisp IDE. Their latest IDE is web based, with a background Lisp app. Neat idea.
- elias94 5y agoThanks for the comment. I downloaded both and I'm really impressed.
- pfdietz 5y agoI used Allegro CL a lot at a previous job, but over the years it was replaced there with free Common Lisps, predominantly SBCL. I don't think there's much of a market anymore for a base CL implementation. So it should not be the least surprising that Franz is making their money from things layered on top of Allegro.
- ngcc_hk 5y agoVery funny. But I found some of the comments seemed a bit odd or blunt. You do not say something like that to your interviewee. It finally dropped when she said why she cannot use apple software since young… what!!! I missed the same surname in the first page. Her daughter she was.