>>You could outfit entire teams with Borland or MS tools for the price of a single seat license for Smalltalk in the 80s or 90s.<< Different Smalltalk implemen

>>You could outfit entire teams with Borland or MS tools for the price of a single seat license for Smalltalk in the 80s or 90s.<< Different Smalltalk implementations, different prices: https://books.google.com/books?id=wJswszKTwl4C&pg=RA1-PA43&lpg=RA1-PA43&dq=digitalk+smalltalk&source=bl&ots=SugTPceBnI&sig=zqNnQvhFkVy5_jufBts_MKtd9-Q&hl=en&sa=X&ei=_lx5VJrUJcX4igLj-oHgAQ#v=onepage&q=digitalk%20smalltalk&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=wJswszKTwl4C&pg=RA1-PA43&l... >>Then Java came along, and it was free.<< Free and The-Future-of-the-Internet TM. ---- There is an important technical / licensing / business problem with Smalltalk that has not been mentioned -- lack of library standardization. Apart from a few core classes, each Smalltalk implementation had different class names and method names for things that once-upon-a-time were special but quickly became commonplace -- like windows and menus and … So you could never hire a "Smalltalk" developer: you hired a VW developer or a Smalltalk/V developer or a VA developer and waited for them to get up to speed with an unfamiliar environment.