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See the chapter 6.3 'The Free-Storage List and the Garbage Collector' in the LISP I Programmer's manual from March 1960.

http://bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/rle_lisp/LISP_I_Programmers_Man...

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Thanks. That's amazing. I always though GC must have been in Lisp from Day 1, but the Minsky article used to be the oldest one I was aware of. Has anybody dug into the original LISP sources (do they still exist?) to see when working GC first arrived?

You can find the source code here: http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/lisp15_fam...

The same site has the sources for plenty of other versions.

I'm pretty sure that is the first implementation of Lisp. Earlier "versions" of Lisp were hand-compiled, because it was considered too difficult to produce a compiler. Then Steve Russell realized that McCarthy's "eval" function could be implemented in assembly language (which apparently hadn't occurred to McCarthy, he considered it merely theoretical) and produced the first Lisp interpreter. Note that the manual is from March 1960 and McCarthy's first paper on Lisp was published in April 1960, so nobody outside his circle at MIT would have known about Lisp at the time.

The manual also states that it's for "a version of Lisp being prepared for the IBM 709", implying the manual was written while the interpreter was still being developed, and all references I've found state that the IBM 709 version was the first practical implementation.

More on the very early history of Lisp here: http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/lisp/lisp.pdf

According to Prof. Herbert Stoyan, probably the oldest GC algorithm description is in 'J. McCarthy, M.L. Minsky: Artificial Intelligence. Quarterly Progress Report No. 53, Res. Lab, of electronics MIT, Cambridge, April 1959.' Prof. Stoyan then mentioned that the 'first garbage collector was implemented by Dan Edwards during June/July of 1959'.

So we have 60 years of GC research.

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