Containers:

Box H01-H56

Creators:

Stoyan, Herbert

Scope and content:

This series constitutes the core materials for Stoyan’s study of the history of LISP, comprising what Stoyan himself referred to as a “LISP museum.” It includes a variety of types of documents, including proposals, memoranda, technical reports, progress reports, manuals, standards documents, preprints, source program listings, conference proceedings, selected serials issues, and promotional materials. Some of the items in this series are original publications, e.g., spirit duplicator or mimeograph; many were photocopied by Stoyan. Books originally in this series were moved to series 7. Interspersed within the series are several large categories of materials, including:

• Progress reports (1957-1972) from several organizations headquartered at MIT, including Research & Educational Activities in Machine Computation by the Cooperating Colleges of New England, Research Lab of Electronics, and Project MAC Artificial Intelligence Group.
• Memoranda and technical reports (1955-1993) containing a few documents from Dartmouth and IBM Corporation (where McCarthy consulted) and continuing with documents from MIT, recording the development and early applications of LISP. This is followed by documents from System Development Corporation, where LISP 2 was developed, and Stanford University, where McCarthy started an artificial intelligence group in 1962. Later documents are from universities and research laboratories all over the world, as interest in LISP spread. See also series 5, Technical reports.
• Manuals (1960-1992) include a preliminary draft of the original MIT LISP programmer’s manual, as well as the LISP I and Lisp 1.5 programmer’s manuals. Also included in this series are manuals for all subsequent major implementations of LISP (e.g., MIT Maclisp, Stanford Lisp 1.6, BBN LISP, INTERLISP, IBM LISP, and Common Lisp) as well as many less well-known dialects and implementations. The collection includes multiple versions of the manuals for many implementations. See also series 2, Manuals, manuscripts and subject files.
• Source program listings (1964-1991) include mostly small to medium-sized programs written in LISP, such as LISP compilers, text editors, and artificial intelligence applications. See also series 2, Manuals, manuscripts, and subject files, and series 3, Source program listings.

Arrangement:

This series is in its original chronological order.

Contents

Access and use