3 ms·

I am not sure if there were any other implementations of overlapping windows on the Alto other than Smalltalk-76 (which was what Steve Jobs saw in his famous vi

by jecel 6y ago

I am not sure if there were any other implementations of overlapping windows on the Alto other than Smalltalk-76 (which was what Steve Jobs saw in his famous visit to PARC). The windows idea was cleaned up and implemented in more static languages for the Star, of course. As Dan Ingalls mentions in his recent HOPL (History Of Programming Languages) paper, several times an idea would be discussed between different groups and in the next meeting the Smalltalk guys would show it working while the other groups were still sketching on the whiteboard. Seeing the idea in action would prompt them to also implement it in Mesa or similar language.

Rochus 6y ago
Well, the claim was "Graphical User Interface (GUI)", not "overlapping windows". There are many examples of GUIs without overlapping windows and even usability experts claiming that it makes no sense to overlap windows. If I recall correctly neither Mesa nor Cedar used them.
- grahamlee 6y ago
  In fact Smalltalk-76 didn't have overlapping Windows, and the people at Apple had already come up with that before seeing the Smalltalk demo. Bill Atkinson describes that here. https://www.cnet.com/news/tracing-the-origins-of-the-macintosh/ https://www.cnet.com/news/tracing-the-origins-of-the-macinto... The screenshot in the article (which _does_ have overlapping windows) is evidently Smalltalk-80 because Smalltalk-76 used the "hollow colon" character in its message syntax where Smalltalk-80 uses the typographic colon.
  - Rochus 6y ago
    There might be a misconception. Have a look at Ingalls' 1978 paper "The Smalltalk-76 programming system design and implementation" (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/512760.512762 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/512760.512762) which clearly shows overlapping windows. There is even an online version based on the original source: https://www.lively-web.org/users/bert/Smalltalk-76.html https://www.lively-web.org/users/bert/Smalltalk-76.html

by jecel 6y ago

Rochus 6y ago

Well, the claim was "Graphical User Interface (GUI)", not "overlapping windows". There are many examples of GUIs without overlapping windows and even usability experts claiming that it makes no sense to overlap windows. If I recall correctly neither Mesa nor Cedar used them.

grahamlee 6y ago
In fact Smalltalk-76 didn't have overlapping Windows, and the people at Apple had already come up with that before seeing the Smalltalk demo. Bill Atkinson describes that here. https://www.cnet.com/news/tracing-the-origins-of-the-macintosh/ https://www.cnet.com/news/tracing-the-origins-of-the-macinto... The screenshot in the article (which _does_ have overlapping windows) is evidently Smalltalk-80 because Smalltalk-76 used the "hollow colon" character in its message syntax where Smalltalk-80 uses the typographic colon.
- Rochus 6y ago
  There might be a misconception. Have a look at Ingalls' 1978 paper "The Smalltalk-76 programming system design and implementation" (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/512760.512762 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/512760.512762) which clearly shows overlapping windows. There is even an online version based on the original source: https://www.lively-web.org/users/bert/Smalltalk-76.html https://www.lively-web.org/users/bert/Smalltalk-76.html