Procyon Common Lisp

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A Common Lisp system that is notable for having the first commercially available CLOS implementation, it was developed by British company Procyon Research Ltd. in the latter half of the 80s. It ran under DOS on computers with a 386 processors or higher, was ported to OS/2 in 1988 with an Apple Macintosh version showing up a year later, and a Microsoft Windows version around the turn of the decade. It came with a graphics library/kernel that the company called Common Graphics and a number of the development tools became visual over time.

The product line was apparently not profitable and was sold to Scientia Ltd. in 1991. They had been selling classroom scheduling software written in Procyon Lisp for a couple of years. The rights to the Windows version were sold to Franz Inc. in mid 1992 for US$ 275k who renamed the product Allegro CL\PC and have been developing it ever since. Scientia continued selling the Mac, DOS and OS/2 versions for a few years.

Publications

  • Richard Barber: CLOS - A Perspective: The Common Lisp Object System [1]
  • Richard Barber; George Imlah: Delivering the Goods with Lisp. Communications of the ACM 34(9); pages 61-63 - 1991

Licence