The name is a pun on the composer and pianist Franz Liszt.
It was written specifically to be a host for running the Macsymacomputer algebra system on VAX. The project began at the end of 1978, soon after UC Berkeley took delivery of their first VAX 11/780 (named Ernie CoVax, after Ernie Kovacs, the first of many systems with pun names at UCB). Franz Lisp was available free of charge to educational sites, and was also distributed on Eunice, a Berkeley Unixemulator that ran on VAXVMS.
History
At the time of Franz Lisp's creation, the Macsyma computer algebra system ran mainly on a DEC PDP-10. This computer's limited address space caused difficulties. Attempted remedies included ports of Maclisp to Multics or Lisp machines, but even if successful, these would only be solutions for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as these machines were costly and uncommon. Franz Lisp was the first example of a framework where large Lisp programs could be run outside the Lisp machines environment; Macsyma was then considered a very large program. After being ported to Franz Lisp, Macsyma was distributed to about 50 sites under a license restricted by MIT's interest in making Macsyma proprietary. The VAX Macsyma that ran on Franz Lisp was called Vaxima. When Symbolics Inc., bought the commercial rights to Macsyma from MIT to sell along with its Lisp machines, it eventually was compelled to sell Macsyma also on DEC VAX and Sun Microsystems computers, paying royalties to the University of California for the use of Franz Lisp.
Other Lisp implementations for the VAX were MIT's NIL (never fully functional), University of Utah's Portable Standard Lisp, DEC's VAX Lisp, Xerox's Interlisp-VAX, and Le Lisp.
The major contributors to Franz Lisp at UC Berkeley were John K. Foderaro, Keith Sklower, and Kevin Layer.
A company was formed to provide support for Franz Lisp called Franz Inc., by founders Richard Fateman, John Foderaro, Fritz Kunze, Kevin Layer, and Keith Sklower, all associated with UC Berkeley. After that, development and research on Franz Lisp continued for a few years, but the acceptance of Common Lisp greatly reduced the need for Franz Lisp. The first product of Franz Inc. was Franz Lisp running on various Motorola 68000-based workstations. A port of Franz Lisp was even done to VAX VMS for Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. However, almost immediately Franz Inc. began work on their implementation of Common Lisp, Allegro Common Lisp.
The Franz Lisp interpreter was written in C and Franz Lisp. It was bootstrapped solely using the C compiler. The Franz Lisp compiler, written entirely in Franz Lisp, was called Liszt, completing the pun on the name of the composer Franz Liszt.
Some notable features of Franz Lisp were arrays in Lisp interchangeable with arrays in Fortran and a foreign function interface (FFI) which allowed interoperation with other languages at the binary level. Many of the implementation methods were borrowed from Maclisp: bibop memory organization (BIg Bag Of Pages), small integers represented uniquely by pointers to fixed values in fields, and fast arithmetic.
Important applications
Franz Lisp was used as the example language in Robert Wilensky's first edition of Lispcraft
An implementation of OPS5 by DEC on Franz Lisp was used as the basis for a rule-based system for configuring VAX-11 computer system orders and was important to DEC's sales of these computers
