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The open source project to preserve, revive, and modernize Medley Interlisp. This extensible graphical operating and programming environment has roots in Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).
This screenshot demonstrates a turtle graphics library that Ryan Burnside wrote for Medley Common Lisp.
https://groups.google.com/g/lispcore/c/NIhVeqiHABQ/m/sGOnRCKbEwAJ
Ryan Burnside published the code of his turtle graphics library in Interlisp, which he used to make the generative art of this screenshot.
Warren Teitelman developed the Programmer's Assistant, i.e. the expression and command history and replay, undo, and editing facility of the Interlisp Exec (REPL), while working on the predecessor of Interlisp, BBN Lisp. This 1972 paper provided an overview of the early facility.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1480083.1480119
Hello from the Medley Interlisp Project! We revive and modernize the Medley Interlisp extensible graphical operating and programming environment created at Xerox PARC.
We post news & updates, tips, historical info, and more. We look forward to connecting with researchers, software preservation experts, Lisp programmers, retrocomputing enthusiasts, and anyone interested.
#interlisp #lisp #retrocomputing #VintageComputing #SoftwarePreservation #xerox #introduction #parc
This 1988 paper discussed the facilities of NoteCards for browsing hypertext documents and mitigating the sense of disorientation the users often reported. Originally developed at Xerox PARC, NoteCards is an early hypermedia system written in Interlisp that still runs on Medley.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220908201122id_/https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.5555/3374430.3374437
A quotation from a report on BBN Lisp, the predecessor of Interlisp, hints it was published in 1966: "[...] magnetic core memory (the only large scale random-access memory available) is very expensive relative to serial memory devices such as magnetic drums or discs."
The PL command of the Medley Interlisp Exec (REPL) prints the property list of a symbol as a series of property name and value entries, one per line. This is the property list of CAR.
This 1986 paper reported on various extensions and forms of collaboration for the NoteCards hypertext-based idea structuring system. Written in Interlisp, NoteCards was essentially a single user hypermedia environment at first.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/637069.637089
Modern Medley Interlisp can read and write files where 16 bit character codes are represented as UTF-8 byte sequences or UTF-16 byte-pairs, and convert from and to Unicode codes to equivalent internal Medley codes. For details see:
https://files.interlisp.org/medley/library/UNICODE.TEDIT.pdf
Medley Interlisp comes with the BITMAPFNS library for reading, writing, and viewing bitmaps in the native system format.
https://files.interlisp.org/medley/lispusers/BITMAPFNS.TEDIT.pdf
This 1988 report contains rare screenshots of Jericho Interlisp, an Interlisp-D port to the Jericho personal computer. This experimental workstation was developed at BBN in the early 80s and also ran Pascal.
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA203845.pdf#page=53
More details on the Jericho (page 6):
https://ojs.aaai.org/aimagazine/index.php/aimagazine/article/download/94/93%20(1981)
"Idle Mode" is a facility of the Medley Interlisp environment that locks the screen and runs a screensaver when the system is idle. The facility, which is documented here, also supports user-developed screensavers:
This Medley Interlisp primer, released in 1993, also includes a glossary. It is interesting to browse through the entries as some describe features we now take for granted, others obscure ones that are no longer common.
Are you using Lisp applications of Medley Interlisp or doing coding projects? We would love to hear what you are doing with the system.
The SEdit structure editor of Medley Interlisp lets you also modify arbitrary list structures and data, not just Lisp code. In this example the ED function calls SEdit and returns the modified object.
Lafite is the email client application of Medley Interlisp. The Lafite-to-mbox tool converts from the file format of Lafite mail, derived from the Laurel mailer developed at Xerox PARC for the Alto workstation, to the Unix mbox format.
If you are looking to contribute to Medley Interlisp the PICK tool helps you decide what to do. This module picks and displays a random Medley GitHub issue, file, or project to work on.