When did you first try Lisp seriously, and which Lisp family member was it?

Well, I'm not the oldest Lisper in the survey (kudos to you, Drew), but I do go quite a ways back. Here's my story.

Wow, this goes back a long way (jostles ancient neurons...). In the mid 1970s as a teen, I was swept up in the new personal computer revolution. I still have my copy of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, introducing the MITS Altair 8800. Two magazines at that time, Creative Computing, and Byte would often have interesting articles about cool and exciting things going on with computers. One such activity, artificial intelligence really caught my imagination. The ability to program a computer to really be like HAL 9000 or the computers of Star Trek was very compelling to a young boy.

In particular, Byte magizine of that time would sometimes have one or two articles devoted to Lisp. Then, in August 1979, in their third language-themed issue, they covered Lisp. These articles were hard to understand for someone still in high school and no education in computer science. But I voraciously read everything I could get my hands on. At the same time, I had a strong interest in Smalltalk, and in September 1977's Scientific American where Alan Kay described the Dynabook and Smalltalk, he also prominently mentioned Lisp as a significant inspiration.

I just had to learn more!

When I got into Arizona State University in 1980, I immediately sought out the computers there and everything in the library I could find about artificial intelligence and Lisp. Unfortunately, ASU didn't have any professors that knew anything about AI, so I was on my own for AI and Lisp. Searching our library, the only book I found was Laurent Siklossy's Let's Talk Lisp. This was a very hard book to read. It did describe the basic structure of Lisp, circa 1976, but it all seemed pretty mysterious to me. For example, there was no quote operator ("'") and the modern style of indented code hadn't been invented yet (see for example, the uncut version of Evolution of Lisp, page 20 , where member is defined in this style).

The other book I was able to track down that year was John Allen's Anatomy of Lisp. This turned out to be extremely influential to me. The best way of describing it was as a primordial version of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (which wouldn't be published until 1984). I still have my copy of Anatomy of Lisp from that time and consider it one of my most prized book posessions.

Unlike the Siklossy book that just seemed to be a mish-mash of CAR, CDR, CONS, and QUOTE without making any sense, Anatomy of Lisp was a beautifully written book. The book concerned itself with data driven programming, data structures and their representation, interface vs. implementation, and how Lisp is implemented. It developed several meta-circular interpreters and compilers in a style very similar to that of SICP. This was pretty heady stuff.

Anyway, I was reading this my first year of college before I even took a computer science course, so when I finally took Intro to Computer Science where we learned Pascal, I had already gotten a very modern treatment of the fundamental issues of computer science, and even had a basic understanding of how a Lisp interpreter and compiler worked.

This proved to be a very powerful mental lever for me, so while everyone else was struggling with Pascal and where the semi-colons go and how to deal with pointers and what not, I had a very solid grounding of what happens behind the scenes. I considered myself very, very lucky that I had innoculated my mind with Lisp before it was calcified by Pascal and the stultifying comp-sci education of the day. I was literally light years ahead of everyone else in my understanding of what "computer science" really means.

Anatomy of Lisp was also important in showing that Lisp just wasn't for AI, that it could be used as a general purpose language.

As far as actually using Lisp, instead of just reading about it, I was able to get the DECUS version of Lisp installed on the math department's PDP-11/70. It was one of those funky Lisp 1.5 inspired implementations that was close enough to Lisp 1.5 to be recognizeable as a Lisp, but different enough from Lisp 1.5 that the Lisp 1.5 manual wasn't really useful in helping me understand how to use it.

It was extraordinarily painful to use. It didn't have macros, the quote read macro, a debugger, inspector, or anything else that we expect in a Lisp today. It did have a rather primitive REPL, but that was about it. Input was via printer terminals, so there was no assistance for matching parenthesis or indentation. I'm really amazed and impressed with all of the Lispers who used punched cards. I can't imagine it.

I pretty much gave up on programming in Lisp because of that primitive, non-standard Lisp, however I kept reading whatever I could get my hands on. A notable book that I read after Anatomy of Lisp was Patrick Henry Winston's first edition of Lisp. It described MacLisp, and a little about Emacs and its integration with Lisp. This sounded really cool to me, and I was bummed that I didn't have access to it. It also was well written and quickly became the standard for learn