Plate I. The Summer Project, 1955–1973

— Research

McCarthy designs LISP

Engraving of IBM Electronic Data Processing Machine - GPN-2000-001881
Engraving after a photograph by NASA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Redrawn and re-inked for iown.si.

John McCarthy designs LISP, the list-processing language that becomes the workhorse of AI research for decades.

Note on the date: Designed 1958; described in McCarthy’s 1960 CACM paper.

Date confidence: medium

Sources

See it in the chronicle