The Revised Maclisp Manual		Page M-2
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[1] The reason the word “also” appears awkwardly here is this: This document was to be published by the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS), but I asked if there was a way to do it jointly out of both labs, since I had recently moved to the AI Lab. I really wanted to just list both labs next to my name on the cover, but LCS had a template they wanted to use for the cover, and whoever processed my order interpreted my request as if I'd asked to add literal text saying I was “also” from the other lab. It ended up looking inelegant and confusing to me, but I didn't get to review it before it went to press.

[2] This is no longer the correct mailing address for the lab, which has been renamed and has moved to a new building. Get up-to-date information from http://www.csail.mit.edu/.

[3] MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have since that time merged to become the MIT Computer Science and AI Lab (CSAIL).

[4] Common Lisp followed shortly after this, but was not available in 1983 when this manual was completed. And the New Implementation of Lisp (NIL) dialect mostly faded out when Common Lisp arrived.

[5] At the time, I probably was focused on listing specific people who had done some specific act that related to the creation of the manual itself, but as I look back on the history of things, I see people's contributions in different ways, and I realize another class of people I failed to credit on the first round that I would like to list as influential in important ways to the creation of this manual:

1. It was a serious error, and one that I am pleased to have an opportunity to at least partly correct, albeit posthumously, that I did not include thanks for the help of V. Ellen Golden, née Lewis, without whose tireless administrative, technical, and personal help I (and probably most people in the Mathlab group) could not have gotten much of anything done.

2. Ironically, another major omission was that of Ellen's husband, Jeff Golden, who was also incredibly helpful to me as a friend and mentor over the several years I worked on Lisp and Macsyma, and who unquestionably contributed to my success there, and hence to my ability to write this document.

3. I'd also like to credit Bud Frawley, who hired me for my first telecommuting job, a summer of work for Schlumberger-Doll Research Center in 1978. The reason he offered for arranging with MIT that my work be conducted remotely from an office at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science rather than on-site at Schlumberger in Ridgefield, Connecticut was that the Maclisp language, which we were using for Schlumberger's pilot project in Knowledge Engineering, was so poorly documented that it would be useful for me to be physically sharing an office with the Maclisp implementors, who could answer questions and fix bugs as they came up. Looking back, this work arrangement was probably one of the key trigger events for helping me to realize that the language needed to be better documented.

   (That work arrangement succeeded well, but it seemed like it wouldn't scale well for other people in other circumstances. It actually occurred to me at the time that I could have just held the information in my head, and that it might be better job security than sharing it, but I cringed at the thought of a social fabric in which people didn't know the meaning of words they were using and where everything was mysterious. So I decided accessible documentation was the better route.)

4. Last, but not by any means least, I failed to properly credit my mother, who helped me a lot in many ways, both financial and emotional, to get through college (not to mention getting there in the first place). Thanks, Mom!

[6] To clarify, “computational support” here means these agencies purchased and maintained the PDP-10 on which this document was edited and originally typeset. None of these agencies funded any part of the work involved in writing either the original hardcopy document, nor any part of either the work or the computational support for preparing this document for webbed publication. For a more detailed explanation of that, see the detailed history of this document.

[7] Incidentally, this refers to the TECO-based EMACS text editor.

[8] LSPDOC is a notational system I created specifically for The Pitmanual and is not really general enough for any other use. It was designed to let me write in readable plaintext and yet have the document appear in nicely typeset form, by using TeX as an assembly language into which the document was compiled, rather than a source language as is often done for manuals (but which more often than not sacrifices easy source code readability). Fortunately, the notation I'd chosen was flexible enough that I was able to re-use the same input data and, with some effort, write a different processor for that data to output cross-referenced HTML instead of TeX.