Hybrid: Lisp Machines: Hardware and Software Architecture Influence

Stephen Kaisler

Lisp was initially implemented as an function, often monolithic, system on conventional hardware - the IBM 700 and 7000 series, the DECsystem 10 as the primary workhorse, and other mainframes.

Designers and computer architects realised that direct execution could yield substantial performance improvement. As a result, two classes of Direct Execution of Lisp machines were developed: Xerox PARC Interlisp D-Machines and Common Lisp variants of the MIT CADR machine. Each class of machines explored different aspects of the residential environment in which all software development, testing, and deployment was performed without resort to external software.

This talk will examine the different directions each class developed, the class architectures, their influence on software engineering, and why they were overtaken by technology and exited the hardware stage in the 1990s to 2000s.

Dr. Stephen Kaisler is a semi-retired program manager and research scientist in Defense and Intelligence. He is currently a associated with SHK & Associates, where his current research areas are natural language processing, advanced analytics and computational consciousness and awareness.

He was Technical Advisor to the Sergeant at Arms of the U.S. Senate, where he was responsible for systems architecture and modernisation of business operations for the U.S. Senate. He has been Adjunct Professor of Engineering since 2002 in the Department of Computer Science at George Washington University.

He teaches graduate courses in Big Data and Analytics, Software Engineering, Guided Research Methods, and Symbolic AI Systems in the Dept. of Computer Science. He earned a D.Sc. (Computer Science) from George Washington University, where he wrote a dissertation: Making Concurrency Explicit: Converting Object-Oriented to Process-Oriented Programs. He also earned an M.S. (Computer Science) and B.S. (Physics) from the University of Maryland at College Park.

He has authored 19 books and published over 50 technical papers. He has been Primary co-Chair for two minitracks at the Hawai'i International Conference on Systems Sciences (HICSS).

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