http://www.ai.sri.com/~delacaze/alu-site/alu/table/Lisp-Hist...
>The Macsyma group at MIT began a project during the late 1970's called the New Implementation of Lisp (NIL) for the VAX, which was headed by White. One of the stated goals of the NIL project was to fix many of the historic, but annoying, problems with Lisp while retaining significant compatibility with MacLisp. At about the same time, a research group at Stanford University and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory headed by Richard P. Gabriel began the design of a Lisp to run on the S-1 Mark IIA supercomputer. S-1 Lisp, never completely functional, was the test bed for adapting advanced compiler techniques to Lisp implementation. Eventually the S-1 and NIL groups collaborated. For further information about the NIL project, see ``NIL---A Perspective.''
http://www.ai.sri.com/~delacaze/alu-site/alu/table/older.htm...
>``NIL---A Perspective,'' JonL White, Macsyma User's Conference, 1979.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIL_(programming_language)
>New Implementation of LISP (NIL) is a programming language, a dialect of the language Lisp, developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) during the 1970s, and intended to be the successor to the language Maclisp.[1] It is a 32-bit implementation,[2] and was in part a response to Digital Equipment Corporation's (DEC) VAX computer. The project was headed by Jon L White,[3] with a stated goal of maintaining compatibility with MacLisp while fixing many of its problems.