strangest systems I've sent email from

[Rich Alderson]

From: Sean Conner
Sent: Wednesday, May 04, 2016 12:00 PM

> It was thus said that the Great Liam Proven once stated:

>> The way LispMs worked, AIUI, is that the machine language wasn't Lisp,
>> it was something far simpler, but designed to map onto Lisp concepts.

> The Lisp machines had tagged memory to help with the garbage collection
> and avoid wasting tons of memory.  Yeah, it also had CPU instructions like
> CAR and CDR (even the IBM 704 had those [4]).

> [4]	It's a joke.  Look it up.

Of course it's a joke.  LISP had CAR and CDR because of the 704, along with
CTR and CPR!  (OK, tags and prefixes got dropped in later implementations on
later hardware.)

                                                                Rich


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computer Museum
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org

http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/