9 ms·

The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI

199 points by kens 9y ago

fairpx 9y ago
It's fascinating how the GUI's haven't changed much since. I run a UI design agency (we work mostly with startups) but would love to collaborate with someone who's working on a (niche?) OS and see if we can redesign the UI. Open Source is fine. If you're working on something, hit me up. Details in my bio :)
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  You can redesign the UI using Canvas, no need to do it at the OS level. It is hard to get past the standard WIMP GUI though, naturalistic UIs (NUIs) were tried a decade ago, but they were found to not actually be more usable.
  - fairpx 9y ago
    I’ve been following OS UI experiments for some years and the problem with all of them was that they took an approach that sounded cool but wasn’t really practical. From 3D desktops to strange card based interfaces that wanted to replicate the messy physical desk. I think the key is to redesign the GUI by removing stuff instead of adding fancy new ways of shuffling files.
    - setr 9y ago
      I imagine the big issue is that the underlying model isn't actually being changed to support the new UI (even by a wrapper-layer); so you're just doing shallow edits to the "skin" of the OS. The problem being the underlying model and the WIMP model have been co-evolving, and likely aren't very open to other fashions of interaction. Presumably, the way to beat it out is to figure out how to change both to instantiate an entirely different interaction model, and thus naturally a new UI. Otherwise you can really only commit to incremental improvememts, but nothing particularly interesting. ie smalltalk's requires an entirely different underlying model to support its in-place editable UI model; it cannot naturally be built (but maybe hacked together) if you try to avoid that shift
      - mncharity 9y ago
        The big incoming UI challenge is XR. But as with ST/Alto, it's an integrated bootstrap problem of hardware, system design, foundational software, user software, and UI. Absent research labs, we wait on market availability for hardware. For the modern analogues of mice and bitmapped screens. Eye tracking may be cheap next year, but now it's $2k. High-resolution HMDs may be $10k next year, but now they're simply unavailable. Hand tracking is flaky. Haptics are "it buzzes". For software, we're so used to the 2D windows interface, it's easy to forget how much foundational work was needed. Eg, around topography, and Smalltalk, and live coding. Hand gesture recognition, spoken dialog management, 3D constraint-based layout, are just a few modern analogues. And so on. So it looks like we're going to be doing broad-based innovation and infrastructure construction, gated on hardware availability. And plagued by patents. It's not clear to me what can usefully be done to explore UI in the meantime. You can do wireframing in TiltBrush, but not really. It doesn't give you the feel of say hand-attached controls, and of automated collaboration in general. The "oh, it feels good to present this graph as a sphere, and hold it you lap and peel off layers". So... Perhaps do UI design by paper improv? A crew scribbling on and holding up paper, hovering around a "user", who is managing a todo list? :) That could be fun.
        scroot 9y ago
        The eleVR people have some interesting demos in this regard, where you program from inside the VR system. That might be the best way to try things out and conduct the "foundational work"
        mncharity 9y ago
        > "foundational work" Hmm, I was ambiguous there. What I had in mind for "foundational" was, for example, constraint engines for GUI layout. Now we have CSS. But there was something like a decade, where we knew constraints were a good way to do UI layout, but there weren't available constraint engines. Each major language had odd bits of abandonware zombies, academic or hobby projects, with code which might or might not be online, or be buildable, or be licensed for use. So we had to wait for market incentives to change, and some non-trivial work to be done, before we had the foundation element of GUI constraint-based layout. An Alto analogy might be bitmapped fonts and display. A current analogy might be 3D dynamic structured graph layout. There's been a lot of research over the years on how to dynamically modify graphs without disorienting viewers. And on how to layout graphs within graphs, and with various spatial constraints. But last time I checked, the github cupboard was bare. So say you want to write a really wizzy todo app with complex dependencies. Well, first you read two decades of graph layout papers; then you write the graph layout library no one else has gotten to yet. Foundational work on our collective todo list.
    - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
      This is what killed Microsoft Surface the Table; the NUIs could never demonstrate their worth beyond whimsy. Metro seemed to actually be a reset with all the NUI stuff thrown out.
    - bloaf 9y ago
      I agree to a certain extent, and I think we can see that in the the evolution of video game interfaces. If you look at games like System Shock 2 to Bioshock, you see that the interfaces have evolved in the direction of finding ways of simplifying the information presented to the player and eliminating irrelevant information.
  - jcelerier 9y ago
    > It is hard to get past the standard WIMP GUI though, More like, it has been shown in numerous research that it was quite good and efficient
- agumonkey 9y ago
  To me the most intriguing part is that, even though I pushed for more, I realize CUA/Windows is 90% of what I need in terms of clickodrome.
- gumby 9y ago
  > It's fascinating how the GUI's haven't changed much since. I think you mean WIMP GUIs haven't changed much (and indeed, the WIMP interfaces of the classic Mac, Windows, current Mac, Apollo, Sun all felt very much like the Smalltalk GUI to me). But I think the tile+touch interface pioneered on the iPhone is indeed a new GUI paradigm which shrugged off the baby-boomer "desktop" metaphor. These shifts require a change in hardware, as any interface that gets traction with technology T forms a local maximum, which makes it inherently conservative. That suggests that the phone interface is unlikely to change. What are the elements of the next generation? Looking at the horizon, some subset of voice and AR+gesture, and likely shared experience (note: I don't believe VR offers any affordances for mass UI). So far I have seen nothing viable (including some efforts I've participated in) with these technologies though.
  - peterburkimsher 9y ago
    Something I see on the Xerox Alto and the Mac, but not on Windows, is Column View. Miller columns are just intuitive for me when browsing a directory structure. I still don't know why Windows hasn't implemented it natively.
    - mrguyorama 9y ago
      Meanwhile I find those multi-column views infuriatingly wasteful. I KNOW I'm in folder A/B/C because I literally just clicked them. I prefer being able to use a smaller explorer window that shows more info. One key to this is a mouse with a fourth and fifth button, which windows intuitively maps to "forward" and "back", and mac unhelpfully maps to "nothing" and "expose" and doesn't seem to have useful alternatives built in. Having back and forward buttons on my thumb, with Window's "Folders come first" list sorting makes folder spelunking much simpler for me
- nikki93 9y ago
  I think React Native / Expo can be an opportunity to do this on a touchable interface. Here’s a thing: https://youtu.be/ZFdFyQBlXXU https://youtu.be/ZFdFyQBlXXU You can eval JS there.
- bloaf 9y ago
  I feel like ZUIs never got a fair shake, and could really do well with touchscreens.
flavio81 9y ago
You know your article was worth writing when my idol, Sir Alan Curtis Kay, Smalltalk inventor, takes the time to comment on it!
- mindcrime 9y ago
  Fun note for those who weren't aware: he's been known to post here at HN from time to time as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=alankay1 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=alankay1
  - flavio81 9y ago
    You made my DAY!
- delta1 9y ago
  The Internet is truly beautiful at bridging generations of knowledge in this way.
andreasgonewild 9y ago
Pharo (http://pharo.org http://pharo.org) is also worth mentioning on the subject of modern Smalltalk environments.
- kens 9y ago
  Ok, I've added Pharo to the article.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
shalabhc 9y ago
An easy way to try ST-72 is in your browser here: https://lively-web.org/users/Dan/ALTO-Smalltalk-72.html https://lively-web.org/users/Dan/ALTO-Smalltalk-72.html and ST-78 here: https://lively-web.org/users/bert/Smalltalk-78.html https://lively-web.org/users/bert/Smalltalk-78.html The above links run emulators in Javascript and have been used for live demos as well (see https://youtu.be/AnrlSqtpOkw?t=2m29s https://youtu.be/AnrlSqtpOkw?t=2m29s for a fun one) Related, for a Javascript based live system check out https://www.lively-kernel.org/ https://www.lively-kernel.org/ (also created by Dan Ingalls).
- robertkrahn01 9y ago
  Thanks for posting the links. The Lively project evolved over time: - https://www.lively-kernel.org https://www.lively-kernel.org is from the Sun Labs / HPI days (check out the ancient http://sunlabs-kernel.lively-web.org http://sunlabs-kernel.lively-web.org, fully SVG based rendering :D) - Lively Web: https://lively-web.org https://lively-web.org A live, programmable wiki (2012-2015) - Since 2016 we are working on lively.next: https://lively-next.org https://lively-next.org. lively.next will focus more on the "personal environment" aspect.
  - detaro 9y ago
    There also seems to be https://github.com/LivelyKernel/lively4-core https://github.com/LivelyKernel/lively4-core
  - shalabhc 9y ago
    Ah, thanks for explaining that. I was always a little confused about the relationship between these projects.
maxpert 9y ago
It's amazing to see how little the concepts have changed in desktop world since Xerox Alto. The only different concept I saw few years back was by 10gui http://10gui.com/ http://10gui.com/ with VR, MR, and AR coming in we need such innovation again.
- PrimHelios 9y ago
  I had some reservations at first, but that actually seems incredibly useful. I'd love to be able try it.
  - KGIII 9y ago
    Yeah, worth watching the video. The music accompaniment was terrible and louder than it should be, but the concept is nice. In the end of the video, they show it where the trackpad would be, which makes me think there might be a size issue. They also show it with a regular keyboard and I'm not sure everyone would require one. I do know that people like tactile keyboards but some folks have managed to function without one. So, a model where the touchpad is also the keyboard might be cool. I touch-type, but maybe the trackpad could also be some sort of secondary display? I could see that coming in handy, perhaps even to display the above mentioned keyboard for this who can't touch-type. Off-topic: HN is one of the few sites where I regularly click on links in the comments. On most sites, that's not a very productive activity. On HN, it is often interesting and educational.
bsaul 9y ago
i wonder what's today's equivalent to this pionnering technologies... biotech gene editing ? quantum computers ? artificial intelligence ? Cars ? Is there someone somewhere discovering the ubiquitous usage of the next decades ? Does computer science still has the potential to bring the same kind of world-changing tools ? Here's something i'd like to ask AlanKay : at that time, you probably had the feeling that you were working on groundbreaking technologies, but what were the magazines saying ? I'm pretty sure some people were thinking that computers were going to play a role, but was this obvious to everyone ? Did people hesitate between funding CS and, say, flying cars ?
- nikki93 9y ago
  Today’s equivalent could be to make the same thing again...
- KGIII 9y ago
  I am not he, but I may be able to offer some history/perspective. There was a real fear of computers back then, much like the fear of AI today. They worried that the 'big brain' would put people out of work and take over the world. Multiple movies were made where the computer was the antagonist, including the famous 2001: A Space Odyssey. The first computer I ever touched was called a calculator and I've heard a couple of reasons for this. The official reason was that people expected computers to be big and the HP 9100A wasn't very big by standards of the day. The second, and unofficial reason, was that it came out in the late 1960s, which was at a time when people had a real fear of computers. If you're curious, I believe the model I used was the 9100B. It supported magnetic strip cards and punch cards to store your algorithm. You'd load it into the memory by swiping the card or inserting the punch card. It would output to a TV and there was a plotter option that functioned pretty much like a modern plotter. There was also a dot-matrix printer included that was like what was on the older POS systems for receipt printing. Anyhow, they called it a calculator instead of a computer. People had notions of what a computer was supposed to be and this was not that. At the time, I didn't really appreciate it for what it was. I think my first exposure was in 1971 and it was used almost exclusively in the physics and astronomy labs. It wouldn't be used in the astronomy labs until later, after the observatory was completed and the telescope put in. This was all at Kents Hill, no apostrophe, if you'd like to learn more about it. It's a boarding prep school located in Central Maine. As I was leaving, we got a mainframe connection to Dartmouth, which was a 'real' computer, though I never played with it. So, largely people didn't seem to envision much for the future of computing, at least not at the personal level. There were exceptions, some visionaries who saw the potential, but the idea of a personal computer wouldn't really exist until later in the decade. Frankly, nobody saw much use for one. Computers were pretty useless without a great deal of domain knowledge. To use one, you were almost required to know how to program one. Specialty software was the norm and interaction was limited without knowing how to program. For the most part, games were also limited to hardware specific devices and were console format or, eventually, arcade games that were not general purpose computers. People really didn't have much use for one in their homes and, as mentioned above, there was a real fear of computers. YouTube has a copy of the HP 9100 promotional video. I can dig it out, if you want. It was pretty remarkable but I wasn't nearly as impressed by it as I should have been. So, I don't really think that the future of computing was obvious to everyone. In fact, I'd say the opposite was true and that it was only obvious to a very limited set of visionaries. Edited to clean up some verbiage and add a wee bit more information about the 9100. Edit again. If you have 21 spare minutes and would like to learn about the HP 9100, you can click this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki1Inux1_wU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki1Inux1_wU (I figure some folks might actually be curious about the tech of the day. That was pretty state-of-the-art back then and far more compute power than most people would be exposed to for the next decade and a half, if not longer.)
gumby 9y ago
Smalltalk was the first dynamic UI environment but within a few years you could do this on lisp machines as well (both the Xerox D machines in either Smalltalk or Interlisp modes and MIT CADR lispms). Which is to say the Smalltalk environment was influential both at the time and later.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  If you read the Xerox PARC papers, there was a lot of shared work between the Interlisp-D, Smalltalk and Mesa/Cedar teams. Actually some of the REPL and debugging features in Mesa/Cedar were done because they wanted to appeal to the Interlisp-D and Smalltalk users, while offering a strong type development environment.
  - gumby 9y ago
    Indeed I worked at PARC (at ISL, using Interlisp) and used all three platforms. This article was about the '73 Alto implementation though, which preceded the D machines (and preceded my time at PARC by a decade as well). At that time Interlisp was PDP-10 only and had no GUI.
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      Yeah, I should have paid attention to the nickname. :)
igouy 9y ago
> If you're used to Java or C++, this object-oriented code may look strange, especially since Smalltalk uses some strange characters. < It's Smalltalk-76 that uses some strange characters. The version that made it out of the lab into the wide-world was Smalltalk-80. edited With help from Paolo Bonzini, Smalltalk-80 syntax for that square root code would be something more qwerty-friendly like: sqrt | guess | (self <= 0.0) ifTrue: [ (self = 0.0) ifTrue: [^0.0] ifFalse: [self error: 'sqrt invalid for x < 0.'] ]. guess := self timesTwoPower: self exponent // -2. 5 timesRepeat: [guess := (self - (guess*guess)) / (guess*2.0) + guess]. ^guess "I Can Read C++ and Java But I Can’t Read Smalltalk" pdf http://carfield.com.hk/document/languages/readingSmalltalk.pdf http://carfield.com.hk/document/languages/readingSmalltalk.p...
- uytuijhgj 9y ago
  From your link: Finally, let’s insist that the separators be part of the method name; i.e., let’s require that the name of the method be “rotate by: around:” and let’s get rid of the spaces to get “rotateby:around:” as the name and finally, let’s capitalize internal words just for readability to get “rotateBy:around:”. Then our example could be written rotateBy: a around: v //This is Smalltalk This is also what Objective-C / Apple does.
  - igouy 9y ago
    > This is also what Objective-C / Apple does. Inspired by Smalltalk-80. See "A short history of Objective-C" https://medium.com/chmcore/a-short-history-of-objective-c-aff9d2bde8dd https://medium.com/chmcore/a-short-history-of-objective-c-af...
- bonzini 9y ago
  The "instfield" line is halving the exponent. In Smalltalk-80 you could write it guess := self timesTwoPower: self exponent // -2. Also, "user notify:" would become "self error:". Modern Smalltalk actually has complete exception handling, so you could also define an exception class (for example ArgumentOutOfRange) and trap it.
igouy 9y ago
> Smalltalk-80 in turn led to modern Smalltalk systems such as… < Such as: - the direct commercialization of that work (by Xerox PARC spin-off ParcPlace Systems) as ObjectWorks and then VisualWorks (now Cincom Smalltalk) - IBM Smalltalk on mainframe and mini computers http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27000344&aid=1 http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27000344&ai... - HP Distributed Smalltalk http://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/95apr/apr95a11.pdf http://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/95apr/apr95a11.pdf - Gemstone https://gemtalksystems.com/ https://gemtalksystems.com/
yipopov 9y ago
Having seen the Smalltalk environment leads me to conclude that modern IDEs aren't integrated at all. It's a scam.
GarvielLoken 9y ago
"Smalltalk is a highly-influential programming language and environment that introduced the term "object-oriented programming" and was the ancestor of modern object-oriented languages." Funny way to spell Simula.

199 points by kens 9y ago

It's fascinating how the GUI's haven't changed much since. I run a UI design agency (we work mostly with startups) but would love to collaborate with someone who's working on a (niche?) OS and see if we can redesign the UI. Open Source is fine. If you're working on something, hit me up. Details in my bio :)

seanmcdirmid 9y ago
You can redesign the UI using Canvas, no need to do it at the OS level. It is hard to get past the standard WIMP GUI though, naturalistic UIs (NUIs) were tried a decade ago, but they were found to not actually be more usable.
- fairpx 9y ago
  I’ve been following OS UI experiments for some years and the problem with all of them was that they took an approach that sounded cool but wasn’t really practical. From 3D desktops to strange card based interfaces that wanted to replicate the messy physical desk. I think the key is to redesign the GUI by removing stuff instead of adding fancy new ways of shuffling files.
  - setr 9y ago
    I imagine the big issue is that the underlying model isn't actually being changed to support the new UI (even by a wrapper-layer); so you're just doing shallow edits to the "skin" of the OS. The problem being the underlying model and the WIMP model have been co-evolving, and likely aren't very open to other fashions of interaction. Presumably, the way to beat it out is to figure out how to change both to instantiate an entirely different interaction model, and thus naturally a new UI. Otherwise you can really only commit to incremental improvememts, but nothing particularly interesting. ie smalltalk's requires an entirely different underlying model to support its in-place editable UI model; it cannot naturally be built (but maybe hacked together) if you try to avoid that shift
    - mncharity 9y ago
      The big incoming UI challenge is XR. But as with ST/Alto, it's an integrated bootstrap problem of hardware, system design, foundational software, user software, and UI. Absent research labs, we wait on market availability for hardware. For the modern analogues of mice and bitmapped screens. Eye tracking may be cheap next year, but now it's $2k. High-resolution HMDs may be $10k next year, but now they're simply unavailable. Hand tracking is flaky. Haptics are "it buzzes". For software, we're so used to the 2D windows interface, it's easy to forget how much foundational work was needed. Eg, around topography, and Smalltalk, and live coding. Hand gesture recognition, spoken dialog management, 3D constraint-based layout, are just a few modern analogues. And so on. So it looks like we're going to be doing broad-based innovation and infrastructure construction, gated on hardware availability. And plagued by patents. It's not clear to me what can usefully be done to explore UI in the meantime. You can do wireframing in TiltBrush, but not really. It doesn't give you the feel of say hand-attached controls, and of automated collaboration in general. The "oh, it feels good to present this graph as a sphere, and hold it you lap and peel off layers". So... Perhaps do UI design by paper improv? A crew scribbling on and holding up paper, hovering around a "user", who is managing a todo list? :) That could be fun.
      - scroot 9y ago
        The eleVR people have some interesting demos in this regard, where you program from inside the VR system. That might be the best way to try things out and conduct the "foundational work"
        mncharity 9y ago
        > "foundational work" Hmm, I was ambiguous there. What I had in mind for "foundational" was, for example, constraint engines for GUI layout. Now we have CSS. But there was something like a decade, where we knew constraints were a good way to do UI layout, but there weren't available constraint engines. Each major language had odd bits of abandonware zombies, academic or hobby projects, with code which might or might not be online, or be buildable, or be licensed for use. So we had to wait for market incentives to change, and some non-trivial work to be done, before we had the foundation element of GUI constraint-based layout. An Alto analogy might be bitmapped fonts and display. A current analogy might be 3D dynamic structured graph layout. There's been a lot of research over the years on how to dynamically modify graphs without disorienting viewers. And on how to layout graphs within graphs, and with various spatial constraints. But last time I checked, the github cupboard was bare. So say you want to write a really wizzy todo app with complex dependencies. Well, first you read two decades of graph layout papers; then you write the graph layout library no one else has gotten to yet. Foundational work on our collective todo list.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    This is what killed Microsoft Surface the Table; the NUIs could never demonstrate their worth beyond whimsy. Metro seemed to actually be a reset with all the NUI stuff thrown out.
  - bloaf 9y ago
    I agree to a certain extent, and I think we can see that in the the evolution of video game interfaces. If you look at games like System Shock 2 to Bioshock, you see that the interfaces have evolved in the direction of finding ways of simplifying the information presented to the player and eliminating irrelevant information.
- jcelerier 9y ago
  > It is hard to get past the standard WIMP GUI though, More like, it has been shown in numerous research that it was quite good and efficient
agumonkey 9y ago
To me the most intriguing part is that, even though I pushed for more, I realize CUA/Windows is 90% of what I need in terms of clickodrome.
gumby 9y ago
> It's fascinating how the GUI's haven't changed much since. I think you mean WIMP GUIs haven't changed much (and indeed, the WIMP interfaces of the classic Mac, Windows, current Mac, Apollo, Sun all felt very much like the Smalltalk GUI to me). But I think the tile+touch interface pioneered on the iPhone is indeed a new GUI paradigm which shrugged off the baby-boomer "desktop" metaphor. These shifts require a change in hardware, as any interface that gets traction with technology T forms a local maximum, which makes it inherently conservative. That suggests that the phone interface is unlikely to change. What are the elements of the next generation? Looking at the horizon, some subset of voice and AR+gesture, and likely shared experience (note: I don't believe VR offers any affordances for mass UI). So far I have seen nothing viable (including some efforts I've participated in) with these technologies though.
- peterburkimsher 9y ago
  Something I see on the Xerox Alto and the Mac, but not on Windows, is Column View. Miller columns are just intuitive for me when browsing a directory structure. I still don't know why Windows hasn't implemented it natively.
  - mrguyorama 9y ago
    Meanwhile I find those multi-column views infuriatingly wasteful. I KNOW I'm in folder A/B/C because I literally just clicked them. I prefer being able to use a smaller explorer window that shows more info. One key to this is a mouse with a fourth and fifth button, which windows intuitively maps to "forward" and "back", and mac unhelpfully maps to "nothing" and "expose" and doesn't seem to have useful alternatives built in. Having back and forward buttons on my thumb, with Window's "Folders come first" list sorting makes folder spelunking much simpler for me
nikki93 9y ago
I think React Native / Expo can be an opportunity to do this on a touchable interface. Here’s a thing: https://youtu.be/ZFdFyQBlXXU https://youtu.be/ZFdFyQBlXXU You can eval JS there.
bloaf 9y ago
I feel like ZUIs never got a fair shake, and could really do well with touchscreens.

flavio81 9y ago

You know your article was worth writing when my idol, Sir Alan Curtis Kay, Smalltalk inventor, takes the time to comment on it!

mindcrime 9y ago
Fun note for those who weren't aware: he's been known to post here at HN from time to time as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=alankay1 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=alankay1
- flavio81 9y ago
  You made my DAY!
delta1 9y ago
The Internet is truly beautiful at bridging generations of knowledge in this way.

andreasgonewild 9y ago

Pharo (http://pharo.org http://pharo.org) is also worth mentioning on the subject of modern Smalltalk environments.

kens 9y ago
Ok, I've added Pharo to the article.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

shalabhc 9y ago

An easy way to try ST-72 is in your browser here: https://lively-web.org/users/Dan/ALTO-Smalltalk-72.html https://lively-web.org/users/Dan/ALTO-Smalltalk-72.html and ST-78 here: https://lively-web.org/users/bert/Smalltalk-78.html https://lively-web.org/users/bert/Smalltalk-78.html The above links run emulators in Javascript and have been used for live demos as well (see https://youtu.be/AnrlSqtpOkw?t=2m29s https://youtu.be/AnrlSqtpOkw?t=2m29s for a fun one) Related, for a Javascript based live system check out https://www.lively-kernel.org/ https://www.lively-kernel.org/ (also created by Dan Ingalls).

robertkrahn01 9y ago
Thanks for posting the links. The Lively project evolved over time: - https://www.lively-kernel.org https://www.lively-kernel.org is from the Sun Labs / HPI days (check out the ancient http://sunlabs-kernel.lively-web.org http://sunlabs-kernel.lively-web.org, fully SVG based rendering :D) - Lively Web: https://lively-web.org https://lively-web.org A live, programmable wiki (2012-2015) - Since 2016 we are working on lively.next: https://lively-next.org https://lively-next.org. lively.next will focus more on the "personal environment" aspect.
- detaro 9y ago
  There also seems to be https://github.com/LivelyKernel/lively4-core https://github.com/LivelyKernel/lively4-core
- shalabhc 9y ago
  Ah, thanks for explaining that. I was always a little confused about the relationship between these projects.

maxpert 9y ago

It's amazing to see how little the concepts have changed in desktop world since Xerox Alto. The only different concept I saw few years back was by 10gui http://10gui.com/ http://10gui.com/ with VR, MR, and AR coming in we need such innovation again.

PrimHelios 9y ago
I had some reservations at first, but that actually seems incredibly useful. I'd love to be able try it.
- KGIII 9y ago
  Yeah, worth watching the video. The music accompaniment was terrible and louder than it should be, but the concept is nice. In the end of the video, they show it where the trackpad would be, which makes me think there might be a size issue. They also show it with a regular keyboard and I'm not sure everyone would require one. I do know that people like tactile keyboards but some folks have managed to function without one. So, a model where the touchpad is also the keyboard might be cool. I touch-type, but maybe the trackpad could also be some sort of secondary display? I could see that coming in handy, perhaps even to display the above mentioned keyboard for this who can't touch-type. Off-topic: HN is one of the few sites where I regularly click on links in the comments. On most sites, that's not a very productive activity. On HN, it is often interesting and educational.

bsaul 9y ago

i wonder what's today's equivalent to this pionnering technologies... biotech gene editing ? quantum computers ? artificial intelligence ? Cars ? Is there someone somewhere discovering the ubiquitous usage of the next decades ? Does computer science still has the potential to bring the same kind of world-changing tools ? Here's something i'd like to ask AlanKay : at that time, you probably had the feeling that you were working on groundbreaking technologies, but what were the magazines saying ? I'm pretty sure some people were thinking that computers were going to play a role, but was this obvious to everyone ? Did people hesitate between funding CS and, say, flying cars ?

nikki93 9y ago
Today’s equivalent could be to make the same thing again...
KGIII 9y ago
I am not he, but I may be able to offer some history/perspective. There was a real fear of computers back then, much like the fear of AI today. They worried that the 'big brain' would put people out of work and take over the world. Multiple movies were made where the computer was the antagonist, including the famous 2001: A Space Odyssey. The first computer I ever touched was called a calculator and I've heard a couple of reasons for this. The official reason was that people expected computers to be big and the HP 9100A wasn't very big by standards of the day. The second, and unofficial reason, was that it came out in the late 1960s, which was at a time when people had a real fear of computers. If you're curious, I believe the model I used was the 9100B. It supported magnetic strip cards and punch cards to store your algorithm. You'd load it into the memory by swiping the card or inserting the punch card. It would output to a TV and there was a plotter option that functioned pretty much like a modern plotter. There was also a dot-matrix printer included that was like what was on the older POS systems for receipt printing. Anyhow, they called it a calculator instead of a computer. People had notions of what a computer was supposed to be and this was not that. At the time, I didn't really appreciate it for what it was. I think my first exposure was in 1971 and it was used almost exclusively in the physics and astronomy labs. It wouldn't be used in the astronomy labs until later, after the observatory was completed and the telescope put in. This was all at Kents Hill, no apostrophe, if you'd like to learn more about it. It's a boarding prep school located in Central Maine. As I was leaving, we got a mainframe connection to Dartmouth, which was a 'real' computer, though I never played with it. So, largely people didn't seem to envision much for the future of computing, at least not at the personal level. There were exceptions, some visionaries who saw the potential, but the idea of a personal computer wouldn't really exist until later in the decade. Frankly, nobody saw much use for one. Computers were pretty useless without a great deal of domain knowledge. To use one, you were almost required to know how to program one. Specialty software was the norm and interaction was limited without knowing how to program. For the most part, games were also limited to hardware specific devices and were console format or, eventually, arcade games that were not general purpose computers. People really didn't have much use for one in their homes and, as mentioned above, there was a real fear of computers. YouTube has a copy of the HP 9100 promotional video. I can dig it out, if you want. It was pretty remarkable but I wasn't nearly as impressed by it as I should have been. So, I don't really think that the future of computing was obvious to everyone. In fact, I'd say the opposite was true and that it was only obvious to a very limited set of visionaries. Edited to clean up some verbiage and add a wee bit more information about the 9100. Edit again. If you have 21 spare minutes and would like to learn about the HP 9100, you can click this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki1Inux1_wU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki1Inux1_wU (I figure some folks might actually be curious about the tech of the day. That was pretty state-of-the-art back then and far more compute power than most people would be exposed to for the next decade and a half, if not longer.)

gumby 9y ago

Smalltalk was the first dynamic UI environment but within a few years you could do this on lisp machines as well (both the Xerox D machines in either Smalltalk or Interlisp modes and MIT CADR lispms). Which is to say the Smalltalk environment was influential both at the time and later.

pjmlp 9y ago
If you read the Xerox PARC papers, there was a lot of shared work between the Interlisp-D, Smalltalk and Mesa/Cedar teams. Actually some of the REPL and debugging features in Mesa/Cedar were done because they wanted to appeal to the Interlisp-D and Smalltalk users, while offering a strong type development environment.
- gumby 9y ago
  Indeed I worked at PARC (at ISL, using Interlisp) and used all three platforms. This article was about the '73 Alto implementation though, which preceded the D machines (and preceded my time at PARC by a decade as well). At that time Interlisp was PDP-10 only and had no GUI.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Yeah, I should have paid attention to the nickname. :)

igouy 9y ago

> If you're used to Java or C++, this object-oriented code may look strange, especially since Smalltalk uses some strange characters. < It's Smalltalk-76 that uses some strange characters. The version that made it out of the lab into the wide-world was Smalltalk-80. edited With help from Paolo Bonzini, Smalltalk-80 syntax for that square root code would be something more qwerty-friendly like: sqrt | guess | (self <= 0.0) ifTrue: [ (self = 0.0) ifTrue: [^0.0] ifFalse: [self error: 'sqrt invalid for x < 0.'] ]. guess := self timesTwoPower: self exponent // -2. 5 timesRepeat: [guess := (self - (guess*guess)) / (guess*2.0) + guess]. ^guess "I Can Read C++ and Java But I Can’t Read Smalltalk" pdf http://carfield.com.hk/document/languages/readingSmalltalk.pdf http://carfield.com.hk/document/languages/readingSmalltalk.p...

uytuijhgj 9y ago
From your link: Finally, let’s insist that the separators be part of the method name; i.e., let’s require that the name of the method be “rotate by: around:” and let’s get rid of the spaces to get “rotateby:around:” as the name and finally, let’s capitalize internal words just for readability to get “rotateBy:around:”. Then our example could be written rotateBy: a around: v //This is Smalltalk This is also what Objective-C / Apple does.
- igouy 9y ago
  > This is also what Objective-C / Apple does. Inspired by Smalltalk-80. See "A short history of Objective-C" https://medium.com/chmcore/a-short-history-of-objective-c-aff9d2bde8dd https://medium.com/chmcore/a-short-history-of-objective-c-af...
bonzini 9y ago
The "instfield" line is halving the exponent. In Smalltalk-80 you could write it guess := self timesTwoPower: self exponent // -2. Also, "user notify:" would become "self error:". Modern Smalltalk actually has complete exception handling, so you could also define an exception class (for example ArgumentOutOfRange) and trap it.

igouy 9y ago

> Smalltalk-80 in turn led to modern Smalltalk systems such as… < Such as: - the direct commercialization of that work (by Xerox PARC spin-off ParcPlace Systems) as ObjectWorks and then VisualWorks (now Cincom Smalltalk) - IBM Smalltalk on mainframe and mini computers http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27000344&aid=1 http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27000344&ai... - HP Distributed Smalltalk http://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/95apr/apr95a11.pdf http://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/95apr/apr95a11.pdf - Gemstone https://gemtalksystems.com/ https://gemtalksystems.com/

yipopov 9y ago

Having seen the Smalltalk environment leads me to conclude that modern IDEs aren't integrated at all. It's a scam.

GarvielLoken 9y ago

"Smalltalk is a highly-influential programming language and environment that introduced the term "object-oriented programming" and was the ancestor of modern object-oriented languages." Funny way to spell Simula.