Description
The Jon L. White collection on Common Lisp contains material relating to the development and standardization of the programming
language Common Lisp and, more generally, the Lisp family of programming languages. Records date from 1963 to 2012, with the
bulk of the material ranging from 1978 to 1995, when White was working at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Xerox
PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), Lucid, and Harlequin Group. Throughout many of these positions, White was serving on the
X3J13 Committee to formalize a Common Lisp standard, which aimed to combine and standardize many previous dialects of Lisp.
This collection consists of conference proceedings, manuals, X3J13 Committee correspondence and meeting minutes, notebooks,
technical papers, and periodicals documenting White’s work in all of these roles. Other dialects of Lisp--especially MAClisp--are
also major focuses of the collection. White also collected significant amounts of material on object-oriented programming,
artificial intelligence, garbage collection memory management, and floating-point arithmetic in his various computer programming
roles.
Background
Jon L. White was involved in the development of the programming language Common Lisp, a standardized and enhanced version
of MIT’s MAClisp, both of which are dialects of Lisp. He also chaired Lisp conferences, edited Lisp periodicals, and sat on
the board of the Association of Lisp Users. In addition to his contributions to Lisp development, White was also involved
with compilers, garbage collection, and higher-level memory management. He earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from
Carnegie-Mellon University and a master’s degree in applied mathematics from Harvard University.
Extent
8.75 Linear feet,
7 record cartons
Restrictions
The Computer History Museum (CHM) can only claim physical ownership of the collection. Users are responsible for satisfying
any claims of the copyright holder. Requests for copying and permission to publish, quote, or reproduce any portion of the
Computer History Museum’s collection must be obtained jointly from both the copyright holder (if applicable) and the Computer
History Museum as owner of the material.
Availability
The collection is open for research.