Lisp Machine

The idea to design and produce a Lisp Machine came up in a discussion I had with Profesor Mihai Draganescu in early '80s.

My colleague Sanda Maican immediately identified and hired Aurel Paun, a very gifted software engineer previously involved in Lisp related projects. I already started to collaborate with two very talented and determined students: Andy Birnbaum and Virgil Bistriceanu. With the core of the team in place the proiect started to run. More about the history of this project in [Stefan '02].

My main, and maybe only contribution to this project was to establish the architecture of the machine reusing the idea of Virtual Multi-Processor . The resulting two-thread machine used:

one thread to implement the EVAL function
another thread to implement a very efficient stack virtualized in the external memory

See details in [Stefan '84].

The involvement in this project triggered the idea of the Connex Memory .

References

[Stefan '84] G. Stefan, Aurel Paun, Andy Birnbaum, Virgil Bistriceanu: "DIALISP - A LISP Machine", The 1984 ACM Symposium on LISP and Functional Programming, 1984. p. 123-128.
[Stefan '84a] Gh. Stefan, V. Bistriceanu, A. Paun, "Implementarea hardware a limbajelor pentru inteligenta artificiala" (Implementing in Hardware Languages for Artificial Intelligence) in Vol. CNEAC 1984, IPB Press.
[Stefan '85] Gh. Stefan, A. Paun, "Compatibilitatea functie - structura ca mecanism al evolutiei arhitecturale" (The Function-Structure Compatibility as the Evolutionary Mechanism in Computer Architecture) in Vol. Calculatoarele electronice ale generatiei a cincea (The Fifth Generation Computers), Ed. Academiei RSR, Bucuresti, 1985. p. 113 - 135.
[Paun '85] A. Paun, Gh. Stefan, A. Birnbaum, V. Bistriceanu, "DIALISP - experiment de structurare neconventionala a unei masini LISP" (DIALISP - an Experiment of Structuring a LISP Machine) in Vol. Calculatoarele electronice ale generatiei a cincea (The Fifth Generation Computers), Ed. Academiei RSR, Bucuresti 1985. p. 160 - 165.
[Stefan '02] G. Stefan: "Masina DIALISP - o realizare cu efecte intarziate", in Conferinta CALCULATOARE SI RETELE DE CALCULATOARE IN ROMANIA 1953-1985, organizata de Academia Romana, 2002.