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Re:The Interlisp Programming Environment (1981) [pdf] by fractallyte on Sunday June 30, 2013 @03:17PM (#5966815)
It's very much like an early version of Smalltalk: monochrome, with an early-80s style GUI. There's a popup main menu with a surprising number of options, plus several editors, debugging tools, and a Smalltalk-like 'Transcript' window (for output). The system is image-based, so the running image could be stopped and restarted, even from a different machine.

More intriguingly - and again, analogous to Smalltalk - Interlisp is more than just another Lisp dialect: it's a complete operating system running atop a Lisp VM, with Lisp as the system language, from top to bottom. Awesome!

By today's standards, it's clunky (as one would expect), but if development had continued, I suspect the comparison to Symbolics Genera would be the analog of comparing a GUI desktop environment to a console-based one. Considering the richness of modern environments (have you seen Pharo or Squeak?), that could've been a seriously cool Lisp development platform...

Incidentally, ParEdit is based on Interlisp's SEdit (in Taylor Campbell's words, 'a real structure editor, not a cheesy imitation like paredit').

Re:The Interlisp Programming Environment (1981) [pdf] by ScottBurson on Sunday June 30, 2013 @10:02PM (#5968213)
> I suspect the comparison to Symbolics Genera would be the analog of comparing a GUI desktop environment to a console-based one

Huh? The MIT-class Lisp Machines also had GUIs from the beginning. Clunky by modern standards, as you say, but definitely graphical.

Maybe I just don't get what analogy you're trying to draw.

Re:The Interlisp Programming Environment (1981) [pdf] by fractallyte on Monday July 01, 2013 @07:39AM (#5969942)
Yes, you're right - I was mistaken (I was thinking of Slime/Emacs). Genera had a proper hierarchical window system - screenshots just don't do it justice!