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Comment by usr1106 | Hacker News Reader

I used Franz Lisp on our student VAX 11/750 at university, maybe in 1985. I have no idea what kind of license the university had and how much they had paid for it. That wasn't a question you would ask yourself those days, all computers were worth millions.

Around those days the university also bought a Symbolics. But its capacity was well below the VAX so students didn't get to use it without working on any very specific project in just that Lisp group.

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At that point it was probably the free Franz Lisp that was included in BSD Unix 4.2 or 4.3, which had an interpreter and compiler (with basically MACLISP semantics so it could run Macsyma) on VAX and mc68k platforms. As an undergraduate in 1986 I ported it to the CCI Tahoe, which was a VAX clone with a slightly simplified instruction set (and the main platform on which the BSD 4.3Tahoe release was developed).

Original Franz Lisp was open source, your university could just download it from UCB.

I ported it to the Atari ST around that time.

Download in 1985? Doesn't sound too likely. I remember using internet at the university in 1989. Maybe employees had access a bit earlier. But I doubt 4 years. I used Bitnet in 1987, but that was elsewhere, to my understanding our university never had it or only later when various networks/protocols got more interconnected.

Sounds more like they ordered a tape or some employee brought it from a trip to a conference.

The distribution could be sent in parts by email if you didn't have FTP access. In the UK, you could connect via JANET to an ARPANET gateway at University College London to FTP stuff from the US, this was before 1985.

The franz-friends mailing list is probably archived somewhere with regular messages describing how to get the distribution.

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