Inventing the Future, One Lisp Machine at a Time
Summary
The piece revisits Xerox PARC’s Interlisp and the Medley/Interlisp revival, through an edited interview focusing on Larry Masinter and Frank Halasz. It explores PARC’s culture of “utter freedom” and the boundary between research and engineering, the idea of treating a program as a living database, and how residential programming influenced both rapid invention and long-term maintainability. It also discusses software preservation, historical UI decisions, and cautions about AI today, connecting past lessons to modern development practices and tooling.