> spending around $2,000 ($1,000 in 1988 dollars) to buy a shelf of the standards documents The ISLISP standardization group did an interesting workaround for

> spending around $2,000 ($1,000 in 1988 dollars) to buy a shelf of the standards documents The ISLISP standardization group did an interesting workaround for this: http://www.islisp.info/history.html http://www.islisp.info/history.html An ISO committee to standardize the language was constituted but stalled on doing any real work drafting a standard. While they waited around, the community drew up a draft standard, which was published as a public recommendation to the ISO committee, with the draft put into the public domain. The committee then voted to adopt the community's draft as the standard unchanged. So now an official ISO document is available for the usual fee, but you can get a predecessor document that looks surprisingly similar, for free as a PDF. Of course, this requires everyone on the committee agreeing to not really take the ISO process seriously. You might wonder why one would bother with it at all then, and in this case it seems to have been to reassure clients that ISLISP is stable by getting it an ISO standard.