Grace Murray Hopper's A-0 compiler was not a "compiler" in the modern sense of the word. LISP was not the first interpreter. Most early programming systems us

Grace Murray Hopper's A-0 compiler was not a "compiler" in the modern sense of the word. LISP was not the first interpreter. Most early programming systems used a mix of compilation to hardware machine code and interpretation. Emulation, a variety of interpretation, was used to allow old code to run on newer, faster machines. There is a large and helpful literature on the history of programming languages. Wikipedia has useful condensed information.