Looking at the talks/papers from 1978 is a trip: Grace Hopper gave the keynote, and there were talks by legends like Backus, Naur, Liskov, Kurtz, and McCarthy.

There are transcripts available of all of the talks as well as Q&A sessions and the like -- really fascinating to look back on now with the benefit of hindsight.

For example, McCarthy was asked [1] whether he believed "that LISP has made any long-lasting contributions to the more 'normal' programming languages, e.g., FORTRAN and ALGOL, COBOL, etc."

He responded that, yes, he thought conditional expressions and recursion were here to stay. Safe to say he was right about that!

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/800025.1198363