An ISO moment

The second meeting of ISO WG-16 was held 28-29 July 1988 in Snowbird, Utah immediately after the ACM Conference on Lisp and Functional Programming. Six countries were represented: France, (West) Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, who had been at the February meeting in Paris, did not attend. Christian Queinnec chaired.

The Americans came with several copies of the Common Lisp the Language specification put into the format designed for the X3J13 draft standard. Each was about five inches thick. They also had a black notebook containing "strategy". On the second day, Dick Gabriel and Patrick Dussud sported "Lisp: Born in the USA" T-shirts. This created a search for counter-slogans (chiefly among the French delegation), of which "FORTRAN: Born in the USA" was probably the best.