Yay history train. Been programming lisp languages since my enlightenment in the 90's and spend 8 years in a startup that was based on Common Lisp and Clojure that sadly disintegrated with the untimely death of my co-founder. Since then I've stopped using Federal Reserve Notes, AKA the petro-dollar, on principal, (< $100 month) and am attempting to build a life of pure reciprocity in a small Montana town. Gardens, orchards, goats, oh my. I spend most of my mornings, before sunrise, coding in a lisp based language attempting to build community support software and continuing on the life-long learning journey that is being a computer programmer.
Will On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 2:51 PM Kevin Layer <la...@franz.com> wrote: > OK, jumping on the history train here... > > My lisp journey started in a CS class at UC Berkeley taught by > Professor Richard Fateman (of Macsyma and Maxima fame). I volunteered > on the first day to fix the lisp system (nil wasn't evaluating to nil, > but generating an error). It was Harvard Lisp and it ran on a PDP 11 > I think. It was written in assembler and had comments about class > assignments. Fateman hired me after that class and I worked for him > on Franz Lisp. First task was to port Liszt (the compiler) from the > VAX to the Motorola 68000. The machine was in a closet and was bigger > than a fridge. We got an early Sun workstation and I ported to that, > too. 4MB of RAM was the same as the VAXen we had. > > I helped found Franz, Inc (with 4 others) in 1984 and have been here > ever since. I manage the Lisp group, do release management for > Allegro CL, as well as lots of other things. > > Kevin > >
