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Scheme has been standardized both formally and informally.
The two dialects in which most major Lisp programs of the 1970s were written are MacLisp (Moon 1978; Pitman 1983), developed at the MIT Project MAC, and Interlisp (Teitelman 1974), developed at Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc. and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Portable Standard Lisp (Hearn 1969; Griss 1981) was a Lisp dialect designed to be easily portable between different machines. MacLisp spawned a number of subdialects, such as Franz Lisp, which was developed at the University of California at Berkeley, and Zetalisp (Moon 1981), which was based on a special-purpose processor designed at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to run Lisp very efficiently. The Lisp dialect used in this book, called Scheme (Steele 1975), was invented in 1975 by Guy Lewis Steele Jr. and Gerald Jay Sussman of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and later reimplemented for instructional use at MIT. Scheme became an IEEE standard in 1990 (IEEE 1990). The Common Lisp dialect (Steele 1982, Steele 1990) was developed by the Lisp community to combine features from the earlier Lisp dialects to make an industrial standard for Lisp. Common Lisp became an ANSI standard in 1994 (ANSI 1994).