SHFT Graduate Student Presents Medley Interlisp Revival at IEEE CCECE 2025

SHFT Graduate Research Assistant Eleanor Young presented "The Medley Interlisp Project: Reviving a Historical Software System" at the 2025 IEEE Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering (CCECE). The paper, co-authored with Dr. Larry Masinter and Herb Jellinek from Interlisp.org, Dr. Eric Kaltman, and fellow graduate student Abhik Hasnain, provides a comprehensive academic overview of a large-scale historical software recovery effort.

The presentation detailed the five-year journey of the Medley Interlisp Project, which aims to revive Medley Interlisp—the final release of the groundbreaking programming environment originally developed at Xerox PARC in the 1970s and 1980s. Medley Interlisp pioneered many concepts now taken for granted in modern computing, including the first UNDO function, intelligent auto-correction (Do-What-I-Mean), and comprehensive operation history tracking.

Young emphasized the project's broader significance: "This work demonstrates that historical software systems contain valuable ideas that shouldn't be lost to technological obsolescence. Many innovative concepts were abandoned not because they were inferior, but due to shifting technological priorities."

The paper establishes a blueprint for similar long-term historical software recovery projects, documenting both technical challenges and collaborative strategies. The Medley project's partnership with SHFT has been particularly productive, with University of Alberta graduate students contributing to bibliography maintenance, documentation rewriting, and public outreach efforts.

The presentation contributes to growing recognition of software archaeology as a vital field for preserving digital heritage and recovering potentially valuable computational approaches from historical systems.