CADR

A CADR

The CADR was the first successful LISP machine, built by the MIT AI Lab as a follow-on to the prototype CONS machine. Production apparently started in 1978; as of December, 1978, four were operational.

Physically, the microcoded CPU was a single huge wire-wrap swing-out bay mounted in the front of an H960 rack. A separate backplane held main memory cards, I/O cards, etc.

Many were produced by the AI Lab; several startups (including Symbolics and LMI) produced direct descendants.

The Knight keyboard was used with the MIT-AI ITS machine and CADRs; this is a rendition of the layout

External links

• CADR - AI Memo 528
• CADR - Bitsavers
• cadr2/mit/ - much MIT CADR material
• Retrocomputing - MIT CADR Lisp Machines - includes emulator, complete sources, and bootable disk images
• LM-3 --- resurrecting the MIT CADR - contains much interesting historical material, as well as current simulation work
  • Tom Knight, Implementation of a List Processing Machine, January, 1979 - Knight's Masters thesis; covers the hardware and the macroprocessor which the standard microcode implements
  • Lisp Machine System Release History
  • Lisp Machine Manual Editions
• CADR LISP Machine and CADR Processor - detailed blog post
• CADR LISP machine - from Paul Allen's collection at the LCM, includes several images
• Images
  • CPU backplane
  • I/O box
  • CADR Tester Close Up at MIT AI Lab