Interlisp (also seen with a variety of capitalizations) was a programming environment built around a version of the Lisp programming language. Interlisp development began in 1967 at Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Massachusetts as BBN LISP, which ran on PDP-10 machines running the TENEX operating system. When Danny Bobrow, Warren Teitelman and Ron Kaplan moved from BBN to Xerox PARC, it was renamed Interlisp. Interlisp became a popular Lisp development tool for AI researchers at Stanford University and elsewhere in the DARPA community. Interlisp was notable for the integration of interactive development tools into the environment, such as a debugger, an automatic correction tool for simple errors (DWIM - "do what I mean"), and analysis tools.
L. Peter Deutsch defined for a byte-coded instruction set for Interlisp, and implemented a microcoded emulator for the Xerox Alto, and then later to the microcoded machines developed by Xerox (originally for the Mesa and Cedar language/environments). These implementations (for machines whose code names started with D) were collectively known as Interlisp-D, and branded as the Xerox 1100 (Dolphin), 1108 (Dandelion), 1186 (Daybreak), and 1132 (Dorado) "AI Workstations".
| ANSI Common Lisp Branch | ||
| Preceded by BBN LISP |
Interlisp | Followed by Common Lisp |
| Smalltalk Branch | ||
| Preceded by --- |
Interlisp | Followed by Smalltalk |
| Tajo (XDE) Branch | ||
| Influenced by --- |
Interlisp | Influenced Mesa |
| Cedar Branch | ||
| Influenced by --- |
Interlisp | Influenced Cedar |
| Xerox Alto Branch | ||
| Influenced by --- |
Interlisp | Influenced Xerox Alto |
| Xerox Dorado Branch | ||
| Influenced by --- |
Interlisp | Influenced Xerox Dorado |
| Xerox Dolphin Branch | ||
| Influenced by --- |
Interlisp | Influenced Xerox Dolphin |