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Table of contents
Title: Jon L. White collection
Identifier/Call Number: X6823.2013
Contributing Institution:
Computer History Museum
Language of Material:
English
Physical Description:
8.75 Linear feet,
7 record cartons
Date (bulk): Bulk, 1978-1995
Date (inclusive): 1963-2012
Abstract: 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.
creator:
Jon L., White
The collection is open for research.
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.
[Identification of Item], [Date], Jon L. White collection on Common Lisp, Lot X6823.2013, Box [#], Folder [#], Catalog [#],
Computer History Museum.
Immediate Source of Acquisition
Gift of Jon L. White, 2012.
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.
Lisp was first implemented in 1958 at MIT and was frequently used for artificial intelligence research purposes. In the late
1960s, MIT’s Project MAC developed the Lisp dialect MAClisp. White joined MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1969,
where he began developing Lisp systems and compilers. He led the later development of MAClisp, wrote and maintained the MAClisp
compiler, and led the creation of NIL, an implementation of Lisp that ran on stock hardware as opposed to Lisp-specific machines.
In 1977, White took a one-year leave of absence from MIT to work on Lisp/370 at IBM's Watson Research Center.
By 1980, there were many discrete dialects of Lisp, and a committee was convened to develop one standardized successor dialect.
White was on this committee, and the group ultimately developed Common Lisp. White was also involved with X3J13, the technical
committee formed in 1986 to standardize Common Lisp under the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). He was the chair
of the X3J13 Iteration Subcommittee, which standardized Common Lisp’s Loop and Iterate macros.
White left MIT in the early 1980s to work on product development for another Lisp dialect, Interlisp, at Xerox PARC. In 1985,
he joined Lucid to develop Common Lisp systems, and then worked on Lisp projects at Harlequin. After Harlequin, White worked
briefly for NASA Ames Research Center, and then at CommerceOne.
Scope and Content of the Collection
The Jon L. White collection on Common Lisp contains material collected and created by White during his work with the programming
language, Lisp, and one of its most widely used dialects, Common Lisp. The records span 1963 through 2012 with the bulk of
the collection ranging from 1978 to 1995. One focus of the collection is the X3J13 Committee’s work in standardizing Common
Lisp under ANSI. This collection holds X3J13’s meeting minutes, correspondence between members, presentation material, drafts
of papers, and voting ballots on committee issues -- with a specific focus on the Iteration Subcommittee. Books, manuals,
and technical reports documenting Common Lisp and the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS) supplement the material relating to
X3J13. Other records in this collection relate to the Lisp family of programming languages more generally, with conference
proceedings, academic technical papers, and other publications documenting the development and use of Lisp and its dialects
(other than Common Lisp). Much of this part of the collection came out of MIT’s Project MAC and the MIT Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory. Material of interest in the MIT material relate to MAClisp, Lisp programming for the PDP-6, SCHEME, and LAMBDA.
The last part of this collection covers other topics relating to programming, such as object-oriented programming, garbage
collection memory management, artificial intelligence, floating-point arithmetic, standardization, and compilers. Object-oriented
programming is an especially prevalent topic, with significant amounts of material from ACM’s OOPSLA (Object-Oriented Programming,
Systems, Languages & Applications) Conference and the periodical OOPS Messenger published by ACM’s SIGPLAN.
The collection is arranged into 3 series:
Series 1, Common Lisp records, 1980-2012, bulk 1985-1995
Series 2, Lisp records, 1963-2001, bulk 1978-1994
Series 3, Object-oriented programming, artificial intelligence, and other records, 1972-2001
Herbert Stoyan collection on LISP programming, Lot X5687.2010.
Subjects and Indexing Terms
COMMON LISP (Computer program language)
Computer programming
Garbage collection (Computer science)
Object-oriented programming (Computer science)