Origin of CAR and CDR

“It was soon noticed that extraction of a subexpression involved composing the extraction of the address part with cwr and that continuing along the list involved composing the extraction of the decrement part with cwr. Therefore, the compounds car, standing for ``Contents of the Address part of Register number'', and its analogs cdr, cpr, and ctr were defined. The motivation for implementing car and cdr separately was strengthened by the vulgar fact that the IBM 704 had instructions (connected with indexing) that made these operations easy to implement.”

--- John McCarthy, History of Lisp

The IBM 704 was not an early lisp machine.