[1][2][3] It was developed at the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (INRIA), to be an implementation language for a very large scale integration (VLSI) workstation being designed under the direction of Jean Vuillemin.
The main goals for the language were to be a powerful post-Maclisp version of Lisp that would be portable, compatible, extensible, and efficient.
[4] Jérôme Chailloux led the Le Lisp team, working with Emmanuel St. James, Matthieu Devin, and Jean-Marie Hullot in 1980.
The dialect is historically noteworthy as one of the first Lisp implementations to be available on both the Apple II[4] and the IBM PC.
[5] On 2020-01-08, INRIA agreed to migrate the source code to the 2-clause BSD License which allowed few native ports from ILOG and Eligis to adopt this license model.