draft proposed American National Standard for Information Systems—Programming Language—Common Lisp

Lisp is a family of languages with a long history. Early key ideas in Lisp were developed by

John McCarthy during the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence.

McCarthy’s motivation was to develop an algebraic list processing language for artificial intelligence

work. Implementation efforts for early dialects of Lisp were undertaken on the IBM 704, the

IBM 7090, the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-1, the DEC PDP-6, and the PDP-10.

The primary dialect of Lisp between 1960 and 1965 was Lisp 1.5. By the early 1970’s there were

two predominant dialects of Lisp, both arising from these early efforts: MacLisp and Interlisp.

For further information about very early Lisp dialects, see The Anatomy of Lisp or Lisp 1.5

Programmer’s Manual.