[TUHS] Other Bell Labs shells from the 80s?

[Paul McJones via TUHS]

> Date: Mon, 2 Mar 2026 11:03:40 -0700
> From: ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com>
> Subject: [TUHS] Re: Other Bell Labs shells from the 80s?
> To: arnold at skeeve.com
> Cc: tuhs at tuhs.org
> 
> there was a lisp shell ca 1977. I always liked the idea.
> 
> there were a lot of shells out there, like the REX shell.

Here’s the paper on the LISP shell:

John R. Ellis. 1980. A LISP Shell. SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 15, Issue 5 (May 1980), pages 24-34.
http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/947639.947642

It was built on Forrest Howard’s Harvard Lisp for the PDP-11:

https://softwarepreservation.computerhistory.org/LISP/other.html#Harvard_LISP_