Happy anniversary! As we near completion of this book it is also the 50th anniversary of the first papers on automatic dynamic memory management, or garbage collection, written by McCarthy and Collins in 1960. Garbage collection was born in the Lisp programming language. By a curious coincidence, we started writing on the tenth anniversary of the first International Symposium on Memory Management, held in October 1998, almost exactly 40 years after the implementation of Lisp started in 1958. McCarthy [1978] recollects that the first online demonstration was to an MIT Industrial Liaison Symposium. It was important to make a good impression but unfortunately, mid-way through the demonstration, the IBM 7041 exhausted (all of!) its 32k words ...
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