I've got my hands on the PDF of "On Lisp" book by Paul Graham. I am about 1/3 through but I've already noticed some things that really bother me. it seems that before Common Lisp (ca.1985?) Lisp did not have lexical scoping, and, hence, its most distinct feature, closures. And, before Schema (1995?), Lisp had separate namespaces for functions and variables (I am a bit confused here, bear with me), resulting in the need for "funcall" function (or is it a form? a macro?) and things like #' and #. .
It seems that Lisp as we know it now (basically, Scheme) is not really 50 years old. And the 50 years old language was barely more usable than Fortran.
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