The Medley Interlisp Project

On World Digital Preservation Day 2025 Eleanor Young gave the virtual talk "The Medley Interlisp Project: Reviving a Historical Software System". The video recording and transcript are available here:

psu.mediaspace.kaltura.com/media/The+Me...

#WDPD2025 #interlisp #lisp #retrocomputing

On World Digital Preservation Day, Nov 6, 2025, Eleanor Young will give the virtual talk The Medley Interlisp Project: Reviving a Historical Software System. Details:

www.dpconline.org/events/world...

About WDPD:

www.dpconline.org/events/world...

#WDPD2025 #interlisp #lisp #retrocomputing

These books document different aspects of the Medley Interlisp environment: the API and using the interactive tools.

Medley Interlisp: Interactive Programming Environment
interlisp.org/documentatio...

Medley Interlisp: Interactive Programming Tools
interlisp.org/documentatio...

#interlisp #lisp

forgejo Beyond coding. We forge.

Codeberg deployed Forgejo v13.0.0 which now detects Interlisp sources and handles them as text rather than binary files. We thank Forgejo and Codeberg for widening the choice of code forges for hosting Interlisp software.

codeberg.org/forgejo/forg...

#interlisp #lisp #forgejo #codeberg #foss

Screenshot of a portion of the black and white desktop of a 1980s graphical workstation environment. The desktop has a gray background pattern and one window with a white background and a title bar with white text on a black background. The window is a file browser with a main pane listing some files, status and input panes, and a command menu. The file list has a vertical scroll bar at the left edge.

Screenshot of a portion of the black and white desktop of a 1980s graphical workstation environment. The desktop has a gray background pattern and one window with a white background and a title bar with white text on a black background. The window is a file browser with a main pane listing some files, status and input panes, and a command menu. The file list has a horizontal scroll bar at the bottom edge.

To scroll a window on Medley Interlisp hover the mouse pointer slightly beyond the left or bottom edge to bring up a scroll bar, then left-click or right-click. Middle-clicking positions the thumb within the bar.

#interlisp #gui #retrocomputing

Published in 1986, "INTERLISP: The Language and Its Usage" by Stephen Kaisler was the only book on Interlisp by a publisher. It extensively covers the Interlisp language and environment with many code snippets and examples.

interlisp.org/documentatio...

#interlisp #lisp #retrocomputing #books

We added "NoteCards User’s Guide" V2.0 to the NoteCards sources. This 1991 manual better matches the NoteCards code that comes with Medley Interlisp but some of the information is only of historical value.

files.interlisp.org/medley/notec...

#interlisp #NoteCards #hypertext #retrocomputing

Screenshot of the black and white desktop of a 1980s graphical workstation environment. The desktop has a gray background pattern and several windows with a white background and a title bar with white text on a black background. The windows display Lisp source code, icons, scientific and business charts, a spreadsheet program, a virtual keyboard, and other graphical elements.

Some 1980s Xerox Lisp Machines came with an IBM PC/XT card that allowed running MS-DOS from the Interlisp-D environment, like the spreadsheet program window here. Image from a flyer of the Xerox 1186 AI workstation.

groups.google.com/g/lispcore/c...

#interlisp #msdos #LispMachine #retrocomputing

Screenshot of a portion of the black and white desktop of a 1980s graphical workstation environment. The desktop has a gray background pattern and one window with a white background and a title bar with white text on a black background. The window is a graph editor with an open command menu providing the options Move Node, Add Node, Delete Node, Add Link, Delete Link, Change label, label smaller, label larger, Directed, Sides, Border, Shade, STOP. The window also shows a graph consisting of 2 nodes connected by a link.

To interactively edit a graph on Medley evaluate at an Interlisp REPL:

(SHOWGRAPH NIL NIL NIL NIL NIL T)

Right-click inside the window for a command menu, click STOP to exit. Right-click on the title bar and click Shape to resize the window.

Try here: online.interlisp.org/guest

#interlisp #lisp

Ryan Burnside designed some visual themes for Medley Interlisp by combining pairs of foreground and background colors. The file medley.sh provides commands for running Medley with the themes enabled.

github.com/RyanBurnside...

#interlisp #lisp

What do Alice's Restaurant and Bonnie and Clyde have to do with Interlisp? Find out in this post, which also features a cameo of Lynn Conway and John Osterhout.

www.markstefik.com?page_id=359

#interlisp #oop #retrocomputing

GitHub - RyanBurnside/FIFTEEN: A sliding tile puzzle for Medley InterLisp A sliding tile puzzle for Medley InterLisp. Contribute to RyanBurnside/FIFTEEN development by creating an account on GitHub.

Ryan Burnside cleaned up and published the Interlisp code of FIFTEEN, the 15 puzzle game he originally developed for the Spring Lisp Game Jam 2023.

github.com/RyanBurnside...

Ryan's original Game Jam submission:

itch.io/jam/spring-l...

#interlisp #game #lisp

Guided tours and tabletops: tools for communicating in a hypertext environment | ACM Transactions on Information Systems The author of a complex hypertext document is often faced with the problem of conveying the document's meaning to future readers through a shared computer environment. Two tools implemented in the Not...

A "guided tour" is a graph whose nodes are tabletop cards (table icons) and whose edges are links connecting the cards. You traverse a guided tour with the control panel at right and the result is a "slide show" of tabletops.

For more on tabletops and tourss see:

dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1...

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Screenshot of the black and white desktop of a 1980s graphical workstation environment. The desktop has a gray background pattern and several windows with a white background and a title bar with white text on a black background. The windows display graph structures with nodes and links and other tools of a hypertext system.

In NoteCards a "tabletop card" is an arrangement of cards (hypertext nodes) on the screen, such as the 3 cards at the center.

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#NoteCards #interlisp #hypertext #retrocomputing

In Interlisp the variable IT holds the value of the most recent event or expression evaluated at an Exec (REPL) and is similar to the variable * of Common Lisp. An example:

← (PLUS 5 3)
8
← (PLUS IT 2)
10

#interlisp #lisp

This 1983 Xerox PARC report documented the state of Interlisp at the time. It collected papers about the Interlisp environment and programming style, development status, and implementation.

bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/pa...

#interlisp #lisp #retrocomputing

Screenshot of the black and white desktop of a 1980s graphical workstation environment. The desktop has a gray background pattern and several windows with a white background and a title bar with white text on a black background. The windows display a graph structure with nodes and links and other tools of a hypertext system.

A NoteCards "browser" is a type of card that shows a hypertext network as a graph structure, i.e. a graph view like in this example. The thumbnail at the top left corner lets you pan and scroll the graph.

#NoteCards #Interlisp #hypertext #retrocomputing

The NoteCards papers:

dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/jiim/vol10/i...

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Although NoteCards predated the WWW, in the early days of the web the Xerox PARC hypermedia system was also used for research on the design, analysis, and documentation of web sites such as the projects described in these papers.

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#NoteCards #web #hypertext #interlisp #retrocomputing

Rooms: the use of multiple virtual workspaces to reduce space contention in a window-based graphical user interface | ACM Transactions on Graphics A key constraint on the effectiveness of window-based human-computer interfaces is that the display screen is too small for many applications. This results in “window thrashing,” in which the user mus...

To learn more about ROOMS see this overview paper:

dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1...

And the manual:

files.interlisp.org/medley/rooms...

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YouTube video by Medley Interlisp Project The Rooms System — PARC Forum with Austin Henderson and Stuart Card (August 1987)

ROOMS, developed at Xerox PARC with Interlisp-D, is what we now call a virtual desktop manager. In this 1987 videotape its creators Austin Henderson and Stuart Card present and demostrate the system.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WL9...

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#interlisp #retrocomputing #lisp

Screenshot of Notecards.

Screenshot of Notecards.

At ACM #Hypertext @acmht.bsky.social: Mark Anderson talking about spatial hypertext and its origins, also referring to Frank Halasz's #NoteCards. See his full paper “W(h)ither Spatial Hypertext?” at doi.org/10.1145/3720...
@hist-ht.bsky.social @interlisp.org

A screenshot of a portion of the reference manual of the Interlisp programming language. The portion contains the following paragraph of text (emphasis is in the original): There have been similar efforts in other LISP systems, most notably the MLISP language at Stanford. CLISP differs from these in that it does not attempt to _replace_ the LISP syntax so much as to _augment_ it. In fact, one of the principal criteria in the design of CLISP was that users be able to freely intermix LISP and CLISP without having to identify which is which. Users can write programs, or type in expressions for evaluation, in LISP, CLISP, or a mixture of both. In this way, users do not have to learn a whole new language and syntax in order to be able to use selected facilities of CLISP when and where they find them useful.

CLISP (Conversational LISP) is the Algol-like infix notation of Interlisp. The 1978 Interlisp Reference Manual (page 554) explains the design goals of the notation and how it integrates with the prefix syntax of Lisp.

www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LIS...

#interlisp #lisp #retrocomputing

YouTube video by PixelOutlaw InterLisp Tool Making Part 2

Ryan Burnside continued using Medley Interlisp to demonstrate developing a data plotting tool. In this video, after going over the main plotting function and introducing some window and graphics concepts he runs and extends the program.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1od2...

#interlisp #lisp

YouTube video by PixelOutlaw InterLisp Tool Making Part 1

Ryan Burnside is using Medley Interlisp to develop a tool, a data plotting utility. In this screencast he introduces the environment, shows how to find documentation, defines a function for generating test data, and explains windows and regions.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ps_N...

#interlisp #lisp

Medley Interlisp supports the "process", a feature we now call "thread" as the Lisp terminology predated modern threads. The system makes wide use of processes and the Interlisp Reference Manual describes the API:

interlisp.org/documentatio...

#interlisp #lisp

If you have an account, once in a Medley session click on the IMPORT/EXPORT button to easily transfer files to and from your online directories.

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Now you can directly access Medley Online guest sessions with the following Interlisp applications loaded:

NoteCards online.interlisp.org/guest?noteca...
Rooms online.interlisp.org/guest?rooms
NoteCards & Rooms online.interlisp.org/guest?noteca...

Evaluate (LOGOUT) to exit.

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#interlisp #lisp

LISP as an Environment for Software Design: Powerful and Perspicuous The LISP language provides a useful set of features for prototyping knowledge-intensive, clinical applications software that is not found In most other programing environments. Medical computer progra...

The 1986 paper "LISP as an Environment for Software Design: Powerful and Perspicuous" presented the features of Lisp for prototyping knowledge-intensive clinical applications, with examples and code in Interlisp.

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

#interlisp #lisp #retrocomputing

We added new entries to the glossary: Break package, Briefing Blurb, Display, and Package. The glossary helps get familiar with the terminology of the Medley Interlisp documentation and literature.

interlisp.org/history/glos...

#interlisp #lisp #retrocomputing