Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!xylogics!world!paradigm!gjc
From: gjc@paradigm.com
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: <None>
Message-ID: <809@paradigm.com>
Date: 28 May 90 18:06:57 GMT
Organization: Paradigm Associates Inc, Cambridge MA
Lines: 32

Remember the good old days of "Applications Wars" at MIT?
At one time the proponents of various lisp-like languages
would prove something by writing a commonly used system
program in their language.

e.g. the MAILER on the MIT-DM machine was written in MDL.
and I remember FTP client on the MIT-LCS tops-20 machine being
replaced with one written in CLU at some point.

Of course the most used program of all: Zork, the super-hairy
adventure game, which was written in MDL.

John Kulp wrote a bitmap conversion driver for a Gould electrostatic
plotter in Maclisp. It handled various fonts and line drawings
rather better than the Xerox Laser printer. But boy could that
thing suck down a KL-10. When MIT-MC was short of memory the thing
was a son of a bitch to have around.

Later on (post golden age one might say), the its INQUIR database
program was rewritten in Maclisp (used to be assembler).

The program that controlled the constance-ii  
mirror fusion experiment, drew the graphs, analyzed the data,
etc, was written in PDP-10 Maclisp. A network interface
subroutine package was used in that one, as the actually
data collection was done using realtime assembler coded stuff
on pdp-11's. (The same package probably also drove the gould printer).

Obviously I'm leaving out a lot of research programs, expert systems
such as OWL, parsers, GLS's Scheme compiler (rabbit), etc. 

-gjc