Exploring PDP-1 Lisp (1960)

ozymandiax

Written by Peter Deutsch, then a then-high school student on a tiny 4K (admittedly, 4K 18-bit words) machine. Amazingly usable - and lives on in the Python REPL concept. Our PiDP-1 simulator on github lets you try it out on any Linux machine (not just a Raspberry PI): https://github.com/obsolescence/pidp1 Posting this in the hope that someone will feel triggered to backport Eliza, it was done in the 1960s but it's been lost :-)

sourdecor

Kind of a non sequitur: I bought "The Genius of Lisp"[0] and it is not what I thought (a book entirely devoted to the history of Lisp - from MIT to Common Lisp and then to Clojure). Would anyone recommend another book? [0]: https://www.amazon.com/Genius-Lisp-Cees-Groot/dp/1069886416/

ozymandiax

I was wrong - it was not Peter Deutsch who ported Eliza to Lisp, it was Bernie Cossell at BBN (one of the famous IMP Guys a few years later!). And it is here: https://github.com/jeffshrager/elizagen.org/tree/master/1966... That makes a PDP-1 Lisp backport very tempting... amazing how ancient code comes back from presumed extinction.