This is the best summary I could come up with:

ANTIQUE CODE SHOW Xerox’s pioneering graphical Lisp workstation operating system is not only alive, well, and MIT-licensed, but running in the cloud as well as on modern OSes.

Unfortunately, when it does, the usual result is that everyone totally ignores it: learning to navigate a substantial codebase and then trying to modernize it so that it can be run on newer hardware, and maybe even be useful again, is a massive undertaking.

(There are also several commercial versions with fancy GUIs and development tools, but the Reg FOSS desk is writing this and we’re interested in the open source stuff.)

One of BBN’s regular customers, the US government’s DARPA, bought a number of the machines for developing expert systems; a famous example is the Fleet Command Centre Battle Management Program, or FCCBMP.

Much pioneering AI research was done using Interlisp, including the early work of Doug Lenat, the genius behind the Cyc Project, who recently passed away at 72.

So far, the team have successfully managed to update the Maiko VM from K&R C into ANSI C89, so that it can be built with modern compilers and can run on top of Windows, Linux and macOS.

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