Wrote my first Lisp program in high school 1974; during a teacher's strike some of us geeks bussed it down to the University of Toronto computing centre. It was cafeteria system with a room full of keypunch machines. You typed up your program and got in line with your card deck. The line started with some silos of job cards. You could write fortran, lisp, pl/1, watbol, snobol, etc and run it on an IBM 360 mainframe.

You placed your deck on top of the card hopper when your turn came up. Most programs were 1/2 inch of cards so there were lots of jobs in a hopper that would take two feet of cards.

The line continued until a 1442 line printer at the end where your resulting printout came reeling out at alarming speeds. Operators handed you your printout and you returned to the keypunch room to review your results and make the necessary changes to your card deck.

The cool thing was we were obviously 15 years old and definitely not attending U of T. And our jobs were plainly not for a class because our card decks were 1 1/2 inches thick with long printouts of gameboard configurations.

But nobody ever batted an eye. We went every day for months.

Eventually I went to Uni during the era of the lisp machines. I worked for a professor who got me an office in the cpsc building. He paid me slave wages but the Lisp Machine lab was across from my office so they gave me a key to let people in who didn't have theirs. Bunch of Symbolics 36xx machines running chaosnet. A loud but life altering experience spending time in there. I spent enough time that I had a cot in my office.

That was mid 1980s, and I've carried on writing Lisp to this day. I still like to run that emulated Symbolics environment that's out there. To this day it's a very effective Lisp environment. The design of the REPL alone is blow-your-mind.

Am I elite? No, but my beard is grey. And on the subject of code generation, the last thing Symbolics did was port their code to the DEC Alpha, the first 64 bit chip. The port compiled their code into lisp macros that expanded to DEC Alpha instructions. The plan was to use different macros for different chips, which was done when the Power PC chip came along.

Then somebody at MIT wrote a little C backend that pretended to be a DEC alpha, and used macros that expanded into calls to the little C backend. That's what allows us to run a mid 1990s Symbolics 3600 image on any of today's 64 bit machines.