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The Medley Interlisp Project

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  1. Ryan Burnside is enhancing his turtle graphics library written in Interlisp. In this screencast he demonstrates some new interactive drawing features.

    youtube.com/watch?v=BYcsghgRsx8

    github.com/RyanBurnside/TURT.L

  2. The ? command of the Interlisp Exec (REPL) prints a list of available commands with brief explanations of what they do. Most are Interlisp-D commands, some modern Medley additions.

  3. Although not a requirement Interlisp source file names are usually all uppercase with no extension such as EDIT or FILEIO. Sometimes Medley Common Lisp sources are all lowercase with .lisp extension like env.lisp or vector.lisp.

  4. A quotation from a report on BBN Lisp, the predecessor of Interlisp, hints it was published in 1966: "[...] magnetic core memory (the only large scale random-access memory available) is very expensive relative to serial memory devices such as magnetic drums or discs."

    apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/AD06326

  5. This 1988 paper discussed the facilities of NoteCards for browsing hypertext documents and mitigating the sense of disorientation the users often reported. Originally developed at Xerox PARC, NoteCards is an early hypermedia system written in Interlisp that still runs on Medley.

    web.archive.org/web/2022090820

  6. This 1988 report contains rare screenshots of Jericho Interlisp, an Interlisp-D port to the Jericho personal computer. This experimental workstation was developed at BBN in the early 80s and also ran Pascal.

    apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA20

    More details on the Jericho (page 6):

    ojs.aaai.org/aimagazine/index.

  7. This 1986 paper reported on various extensions and forms of collaboration for the NoteCards hypertext-based idea structuring system. Written in Interlisp, NoteCards was essentially a single user hypermedia environment at first.

    dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/637

    dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/637

  8. This 1984 paper introduced the basic ideas of programming with objects in various languages with examples from LOOPS, the Lisp Object-Oriented Programming System of Interlisp.

    ojs.aaai.org/aimagazine/index.

    ojs.aaai.org/aimagazine/index.

  9. What strategies can be employed to describe a problem and converge on an appropriate hypertext representation? This 1987 paper explored such representation issues with NoteCards, the hypermedia system written in Interlisp.

    dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/317

    dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/317

  10. How long have you been using Lisp? Any dialect, including Emacs Lisp.

  11. We retrieved from an old archive "NoteCards User’s Guide" V2.0 and added it to the source tree. Published in 1991, this manual better matches the NoteCards code that comes with Medley Interlisp but some of the information the document provides is now only of historical value.

    files.interlisp.org/medley/not

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

    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 tabletop cards and guided tours see:

    dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/585

  13. 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.

  14. Although NoteCards predated the WWW, in the early days of the web the hypermedia system developed with Interlisp-D was also used for research on the design, analysis, and documentation of web sites such as the projects described in these papers.

    dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/268

    scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/jii

  15. A comprehensive introduction to the NoteCards hypermedia system developed in Interlisp at Xerox PARC. This 1985 videotape covers and demonstrates tha basic system, the programmer's interface, and research issues.

    youtube.com/watch?v=CZCitxFlnqQ

    youtube.com/watch?v=MsYGDON_7Ds