Run a very old InterLisp program

Question

I have some proprietary data (civil engineering models) stored in binary files. There's also some InterLisp sources and a core dump file (I guess this is what Lisp compiles to ... for some reason). I'm told that program is a GUI for manipulating the models and exporting and importing the data.

I'm looking for advice on how to get the data out of the binary format. Is there an InterLisp interpreter that would work on a modern OS? If not what is my best option for porting the code to a more recent Lisp platform?

Answer 1

I've gotten an Interlisp environment running on my machine using QEMU and old Debian images before (see screenshot). Here are the steps:

• Download and set up a Debian 3.0r2 install in a virtual machine (or physical machine if you have an old one spare). Get the disk image from the archives.

• Get the LFG software from the PARC FTP server (the link is on the page) which includes an Interlisp environment. The FTP server also has a Linux emulator called lde to run the image.

• Use lde to run the Interlisp image (lfg.sysout IIRC) inside the virtual machine.

This is all do-able with software that's distributed on the web. You can still find old Interlisp manual scans around too. Ideally, I would just provide a working VM image, but since it's not free software I don't want to redistribute it unofficially.