Medley Interlisp is the environment originally developed for the Xerox Lisp machines (called D-machines, names Dorado, Dolphin, Dandelion, Daybreak). The project was spun out to a company called Envos, which then turned into Venue.

It was the first IDE with a window/mouse/menu GUI, launched as a product from Xerox in 1980. It was a base from which AI applications were built, as well as a research project in its own right.

For example, Interlisp SEDIT is the canonical ancestral structure editor. Masterscope and the “file package” included system-management tools that combined features of version control and build systems, with comprehensive cross referencing support.

Medley was the last release of the Xerox Lisp environment, before the whole environment was renamed Medley. It was originally written in Interlisp (a dialect separate from the MACLISP/Common Lisp tradition, with its own ancestry), but later, Common Lisp also became part of the environment. Medley includes a WYSIWYG text editor (TEdit), email organizer (Lafite), performance tools (Spy) and many other libraries and user contributed code (from the 1980s).

The 1992 ACM Software System Award, to Daniel G. Bobrow, Richard R. Burton, L. Peter Deutsch, Ronald M. Kaplan, Larry Masinter, Warren Teitelman

… for their pioneering work in programming environments that integrated

– source-language debuggers,
– fully compatible integrated interpreter/compiler,
– automatic change management,
– structure-based editing,
– logging facilities,
– interactive graphics, and
– analysis/profiling tools

in the Interlisp system.