Franz Lisp was available free of charge to educational sites, and was also distributed on Eunice, a Berkeley Unix emulator that ran on VAX VMS.

In particular, it was ported to a prototype Sun-1 made by Sun Microsystems, which ran a variant of Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Unix called SunOS.

In 1986, at Purdue University, Franz Lisp was ported to the CCI Power 6/32 platform, code named Tahoe.

The major contributors to Franz Lisp at UC Berkeley were John K. Foderaro, Keith Sklower, and Kevin Layer.

Many of the implementation methods were borrowed from Maclisp: bibop memory organization (BIg Bag Of Pages), small integers represented uniquely by pointers to fixed values in fields, and fast arithmetic.