sign in sign up
<<
Home , Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Dynabook, PARC (company), Smalltalk

Smalltalkreading list

Smalltalk introduced the world to Object Much of the genesis of is explained Smalltalk was created over the course of a For the history in leading up to Oriented programming, a way of representing in ’s for Children decade starting in 1970 at ’s Palo Alto the inspiration and creation of Smalltalk, see as a network of interconnected and of All Ages wherein he describes the Research Center (better known as Xerox PARC) John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said. intercommunicating little computers. It has computer. The Dynabook was to be by the company’s Learning Research Group. influenced nearly every programming a personal dynamic computer, with a flat language since, including Objective , , screen and a keyboard (today’s iPads bear a When people think about Smalltalk as a and Swift. striking resemblance). professional it’s almost always Smalltalk-80 (released in This reading list contains books, essays, and The Dynabook’s system software was 1980) they’re thinking about, but in fact videos detailing the time and place from intended to be built and modified by anyone, Smalltalk had dozens of versions and which Smalltalk emerged, the mindsets and for books and music, but more importantly for revisions in the preceding decade. visions of its creators, and the influences understanding complex systems. Smalltalk has had on computer systems and Smalltalk was originally intended as a their programming languages. The Smalltalk software and hardware that medium of expression, and not as a For the history of Xerox PARC in the decade came out of Xerox PARC were in direct pursuit professional developer tool until much later. that lead to not only Smalltalk, but other Jason Brennan, May 2015. of the Dynabook vision. Kay went so far as to innovations like and the laser call the Alto computers “interim Dynabooks.” Alan Kay, influenced by the media studies of printer, see Michael Hiltzik’s Dealers of Marshall McLuhan and inspired by the Lightning. revelatory work being done with computers in Thanks to Marshall McLuhan’s studies on 1960s California, began the Smalltalk project media and our relationships with them, Alan as a personal dynamic medium of expression correctly recognized the potential for the on personal computers. Alan gave the concept personal computer as a medium when the Object Oriented Programming its name and contemporary viewpoint had the computer as its first true form in Smalltalk. a vehicle at best. See McLuhan’s Understanding Media for more See The Early History of Smalltalk for more For a deep look at the technical details of the reference on the topic of media and our information. Smalltalk system, see the famous issue of relationships with them. Byte Magazine.

McLuhan’s big idea, distilled to the pull quote Adele Goldberg not only helped develop “the medium is the message” is we change Smalltalk at PARC but was also responsible our thinking in order to adapt to different for early testing with students. She wrote media. It’s the medium, not the message, that much of the official Smalltalk documentation entails how we change. and helped establish what would become OOP . McLuhan argues, for example, that For the influences of Smalltalk on Objective C, Gutenberg’s invention of a movable type It should be noted while she is often credited and other object oriented programming production system, and therefor the arrival of for her work with Smalltalk, few other women languages, see Brad Cox and Andrew J the printing press in medieval Europe, are acknowledged for any contributions made Novobilski’s Object Oriented Programming: ushered in repeatable, rational thought, the to its development, as is often the case in An Evolutionary Approach. Age of Reason, the Scientific Revolution, and technology history. the concept of nationalism—all more or less accidentally. See Personal Dynamic Media and Adele’s chapter of Points of View (pp 9)

Ivan Sutherland’s (1963), introduced the graphical , constraint based programming, and the first “master / instance” form of computer objects is responsible for many of the all in one year in one project. The project was early implementations of Smalltalk, having deeply influential to future graphical personal built around 80 implementations of it in the computers, and to Smalltalk’s development. . He helped build the bitblt algorithm for rapidly moving regions of memory. The When asked how he invented so many algorithm helped make overlapping windows important concepts in one year, Sutherland possible. replied “Well, I didn’t know it was hard.”

See Sutherland’s original paper or this video of a software demonstration.

Doug Engelbart’s Online System (1968) was created with the help of fellow SRI researchers to augment human intellect. The system introduced the concept of , multiple views of interconnected data, groundbreaking networked collaboration, simultaneous typing and chorded keyboards, and the mouse as an input device. The system was jaw- dropping even by today’s standards, and reshaped the computer as a personal device.

See Engelbart’s Augmenting Human Intellect manifesto and his team’s Mother of All Demos presenting some early completed work.