What people are saying

Do you know of a new blog, tweet or other communication talking about Interlisp or Medley? If so, we would like to hear about it.

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Musings on Medley and Interlisp

Various individuals have written thoughts on Interlisp and the Medley project; their stories can be found here.

News Articles and Reporting

• War of the workstations: How the lowest bidders shaped today’s tech landscape posted to The Register by Liam Proven There were several big vendors of Lisp machines. As we covered recently, Xerox sold them, and its Lisp OS is now FOSS.

• Revival of Medley/Interlisp: Elegant weapon for a more civilized age sharpened up again posted to The Register by Liam Proven Xerox’s pioneering graphical Lisp workstation operating system is not only alive, well, and MIT-licensed, but running in the cloud as well as on modern OSes.

• Reviving Interlisp With The Medley Interlisp Project posted to Hackaday by Maya Posch Within the Artificial Intelligence and natural language research communities, Lisp has played a major role since 1960. Over the years since its introduction, various development environments have been created that sought to make using Lisp as easy and powerful as possible. One of these environments is Interlisp, which saw its first release in 1968, and its last official release in 1992. That release was Medley 2.0, which targeted various UNIX machines, DOS 4.0, and the Xerox 1186. Courtesy of the Interlisp open source project (GitHub), Medley Interlisp is available for all to use, even on modern systems.

Blogs and Online Discussions

• Steven Harms published a blog series on setting up a distraction free FreeBSD laptop environment and shared his experience with installing and running some application programs, including Medley.
  I’m also pleased to report that Medley worked out of the box in Wayland + Sway through Wayland’s XWayland interface.

• Vindarel praised the Medley Interlisp Project in a roundup of what happened in Common Lisp and the broader Lisp world in 2023 and 2024.
  We can run the Medley Interlisp Lisp machine in a browser O_o The work achieved by this group is phenomenal, […]

• In a post on the visual feedback of code changes in development environments Steven Harms mentioned Medley and its revival.
  […] its original developers ported the code to work on the X86 chipset architecture and have brought the glorious, streamlined, black-and-white IDE-as-OS environment of Medley into the public’s hands as open source.

• Alex Schroeder shared his first impressions on and goals for using Medley.
  Designing Medley Interlisp such that it has this fuzzy boundary and can access a web browser and a PDF viewer outside is great;

• Eugene Zaikonnikov recapped the discovery of the Interlisp code of Eurisko, the seminal AI system by Doug Lenat, and shared a video in which Eugene introduces the program and demonstrates it running on Medley.
  Truly an Indiana Jones finding the Lost Ark moment.

• What Were the Differences Between Symbolics Genera and Xerox Interlisp-D asked by Simon Brooke in Hacker News
  … I’m curious about the similarities and differences between Symbolics Genera and Xerox Interlisp-D. Why is Genera more hyped than Interlisp-D? Unlike Genera, which is proprietary and is extremely difficult to obtain legally, Interlisp-D is now free, open-source software, and there’s a community that has ported Interlisp-D to run on top of modern operating systems.

• InterLisp Fifteen Puzzle by Pixel_Outlaw in his blog.
  In some ways, this project was the fulfillment of me wanting to see what Xerox PARC brought to the table during the peak of Lisp AI research. It was from a time when what “Lisp” was was still being explored. You see heavy traces of the era in InterLisp.

• Stringscope, a string listing tool in Interlisp by Paolo Amoroso in his blog
  I wanted to create something small that carries out a limited but useful task. My goal was to familiarize with the Medley Interlisp development environment, tools, and process through developing, optimizing, documenting, and sharing an Interlisp program.

• My encounter with Medley Interlisp by Paolo Amoroso in his blog also cross-posted to Hacker News
  Imagine someone let you into an alien spaceship they landed in your backyard, sat you at the controls, and encouraged you to fly the ship. This is the opportunity Medley Interlisp offers….

• FreeBSD on Dell T3600 by trhawes on Reddit FreeBSD … I’m a retro enthusiast who loves Lisp, so natually, I’d want to show off my Medley Interlisp virtual machine (emulating a Xerox Lisp Machine).

• Computers Doing the Right Thing by Amjad Masad in his blog
  Interlisp is one of the most fascinating could-have-been computer systems in history. It shipped with one of the first from-the-ground-up interactive programming environments, structured editor, and many other innovations. Most impressive was the concept of Do What I Mean (DWIM).

• The Interlisp Programming Environment asked by gruseom in Hacker News
  Interlisp was the so-called “west coast” Lisp that emphasized an interactive programming environment and in retrospect looks more like a hybrid between Smalltalk and Lisp than modern Lisp implementations. It was developed at PARC for a while. I don’t know if there was cross-pollination between Interlisp and Smalltalk or if the similarity was a zeitgeist thing.

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