clojureD 2019: "About the Unknown East of the Ancient LISP World. History and Thoughts" by Ingo Mohr

Ingo Mohr shares the history of the dedicated LISP community in East Germany during the 1970s and 1980s.

Most LISP people don’t know about the small but highly committed LISP community east of the Iron Curtain, in East Germany (GDR). It’s widely unknown that for example in the 1980s LISPers of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR worked on natural language processing, automatic action planning for robots, expert systems, a full featured Common LISP system including a development environment, or on a highly optimizing LISP compiler which produces code nearly as fast as C for problems typically solved in C. They even began to build a self designed LISP machine to speed up LISP processing using specialized hardware! Already in the second half of the 1970s Herbert Stoyan, at that time working at the Technical University of Dresden, provided a basis for LISP development in East Germany with a LISP interpreter on IBM-like mainframe computers. It was widely used in research, teaching and production. I used this interpreter for my first LISP programs, interactive on a very low level – with punch cards and printed listings. In my talk I will tell you about this exciting time, which is not least an important part of my own history. Besides history and stories I will share with you some of my very own insights and thoughts of this time about programming in general and LISP in particular. Please enjoy and take some knowledge and insights about some special LISP history with you.