History

History Elsewhere on the Web

Early Doc


The Lisp I Programmer's Manual
McCarthy, Brayton, et al; Computation Center and Research Laboratory of Electronics, MIT, March 1960

Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I
John McCarthy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass. April 1960

The Lisp 1.5 Programmer's Manual
McCarthy, Levin, et al; MIT Press, 1962

Lisp 1.5 Primer
Clark Weissman; Dickenson Publishing Company, 1967

Looking Back


History of Lisp
John McCarthy, February, 1979

LISP-NOTES ON ITS PAST AND FUTURE-1980
John McCarthy

Early LISP History (1956-1959)
by Herbert Stoyan University of Erlangen-N"urnberg

The Influence of the Designer on the Design -- J. McCarthy and LISP
by Herbert Stoyan University of Erlangen-N"urnberg

Brief History of the Lisp Language
Extracted from the Common Lisp specification by Kent M Pitman, edited by Bradford W Miller

The Evolution of Lisp
Guy Steele and Richard Gabriel, 1993

Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big
Richard Gabriel

Other Lisp History Collections

John McCarthy's Home Page

Lisp History
and Lisp Articles
Curator: Paul Graham

Lisp History
Curator: Herbert Stoyan

ALU Lisp History

History of Lisp at Computer History Museum
Curator: Paul McJones

Pages about Lisp's history

[New, original recollections eagerly sought]

  • History of Common Lisp - This page attempts to provide some short historical background on Common Lisp, with particular emphasis on how the more popular open source CL implementations came into being