About 25 years ago Symbolics and Lisp Machines spun off from the MIT AI lab. MIT licensed the intelectual property around a machine known as the CADR, or MIT CADR, to these companies. This was a landmark event in the history of open source. This event made it clarified a lot of people’s thinking, particularly Richard Stallman.

Licensing the CADR community’s code to private interests shifted the incentives around that Lisp community. In effect MIT transfered ownership of the community, which it did not own, to private interests. Where previously the motivations for community member were intrinsic, social, and in the final analysis about common cause afterward the motivations were explicit, commercial, and foremost monetary. The resulting boom and bust of the community was quite a ride; and just short of fatal.

Again and again over the last 25 years various parties have made a run at getting the MIT intelectual property licencing office to relinquish the rights to the CADR, to move them into the commons. At long last Brad Parker has succeed. Go Brad!

Looking at the code from today’s vantage point is kind of recreational. Most of the files are from 1980. There is one file dated 1973; making it the oldest file, who’s data seems accurate, on my machine.

Lisp machines instruction sets were sympathetic to the implementation of dynamically typed languages. With support for ephemerial garbage collection, exception handling, dynamic binding, etc. etc. The CADR was microcoded. The sources include all the microcode.

The 1970s marked the acceptance that people would get their own computer with a big display and related software. The code contains a complete window system.

While object oriented programming runs back at least as far as Simula circa 1968; it didn’t really begin to win the day over efficency until people found they were racing each other to see how fast they could build a window system. We still see people searching for the right cut point between class system and primitive types. It’s interesting to see that the class system in the CADR appears to have treating all the types all the way down as first class instances. But it looks like this code doesn’t use multiple inheritance!

When MIT did this, the larger Lisp community had lots of branch offices, each with it’s own dialect of Lisp. Common Lisp the ANSI standard dialect that attempted to reduce that diversity and create some standard around which people could rendezvous came latter. The elegance of the Common Lisp dialect, particularly the beauty of it’s original specification, was an important part of what triggered my decision to switch over to Lisp.

The dialect of Lisp used for the CADR is interesting. Consider this routine that returns a tree of cons cells representing the class hierarchy:

;Returns a tree whose leaves are instances of CLASS-CLASS
(DEFMETHOD (CLASS-CLASS :CLASS-CLASS-HIERARCHY) ()
  (CONS SELF (COND ((EQ CLASS-SYMBOL 'OBJECT-CLASS)
                    NIL)
		   ((ENTITYP SUPERCLASS)
		    (< - SUPERCLASS ':CLASS-CLASS-HIERARCHY))
		   (T (MAPCAR (FUNCTION (LAMBDA (X) (<- X ':CLASS-CLASS-HIERARCHY)))
			      SUPERCLASS)))))

Methods were apparently invoked by the function “< -" and named using symbols from the keywords package, i.e. :CLASS-CLASS-HIERARCHY. In common lisp methods are simply functions so where this code has (< - SUPERCLASS ':CLASS-CLASS-HIERARCHY) in Common Lisp you’d write (CLASS-CLASS-HIERARCHY SUPERCLASS).

In that routine the object the method is working on is lexially bound to the variable SELF as it’s fields (or slots) of the class instance. That kind of syntatic sugar has fallen out of favor. These days you’d have to explicitly bind those.

I wonder about the quote on ':CLASS-CLASS-HIERARCHY; was it already vestigial?

The sources include some amusing litter. At the time in the MIT used a networking design known as Chaosnet; a variant of Ethernet. Apparently the physical address of hosts on that net were selected so they revealed the machine’s physical location along the cable. Sort of how many nanoseconds your machine is from the terminator on the cable. I’d totally forgotten how fickle those early networks were.

I actually doubt that history would have unfolded very differently if MIT had relinquished the license back in 1980 rather than in 2005; but it’s a debatable point.

Update: John Wiseman write: “I worry that the Lisp community’s fascination with the past is mostly pathology at this point.”

Absolutely true. All tiny ethnic enclaves have that problem. Members of a diaspora can and ought to say such things. Outsiders are best advised to mind their own business.