Software Archaeology: The Medley Interlisp Modernisation Project

Описание: During the early days of Artificial Intelligence research, Lisp dialects were the primary programming language for developing symbolic (AI) applications. Multiple dialects were developed, but one of the most widely used was Interlisp, originated at BBN, and then moved to Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre. By the early 1990s, symbolic AI research had waned and Interlisp had been overtaken by Common Lisp. Recently (2010), Interlisp.org, led by Larry Masinter, was formed by some of the original developers to modernize and enhance Medley Interlisp to run on modern machines. Today, Medley Interlisp is available on various Linux-based machines, on Apple Mac computers, and in several forms for Windows 10/11-based machines. This talk will discuss the history and technology of Medley Interlisp, its migration to and implementation on modern operating systems, some of the issues in modernising a historical software system, some key features, and future activities.

About the speaker

Steve Kaisler has a varied career, mostly in the US defence and intelligence community as a contractor for over 40 years (now semiretired). He has held positions as a Strategic Computing Program Manager at DARPA and as Director of System Architecture and Technical Advisor to the Sergeant At Arms of the United States Senate. He has been an Adjunct Professor of Engineering at George Washington University, Washington, DC in Computer Science for 44 years. He has written over 50 technical papers and 16 books of which 9 volumes are part of his Historical Computing Machines series published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. He has also run the Enterprise Architecture and the Big Data and Analytics minitracks at the Hawai’i International Conference on Systems Science for the past 20 years