Following
McCarthy's departure to the Stanford Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory, MIT hackers refined the
language into a local dialect dubbed MACLISP. The "MAC"
stood for Project MAC, the DARPA-funded research
project that gave birth to the AI Lab and the
Laboratory for Computer Science. Led by AI Lab
arch-hacker Richard Greenblatt, AI Lab programmers
during the 1970s built up an entire Lisp-based
operating system, dubbed the Lisp Machine operating
system. By 1980, the Lisp Machine project had generated
two commercial spin-offs. Symbolics was headed by
Russell Noftsker, a former AI Lab administrator, and
Lisp Machines, Inc., was headed by Greenblatt.
The Lisp Machine software was hacker-built, meaning it
was owned by MIT but available for anyone to copy as
per hacker custom. Such a system limited the marketing
advantage of any company hoping to license the software
from MIT and market it as unique. To secure an
advantage, and to bolster the aspects of the operating
system that customers might consider attractive, the
companies recruited various AI Lab hackers and set them
working on various components of the Lisp Machine
operating system outside the auspices of the AI Lab.
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