My biggest interaction with Smalltalk was having been invited by Alan Kay (along with a number of others from my university) to tour Parc. We got down there, sa

My biggest interaction with Smalltalk was having been invited by Alan Kay (along with a number of others from my university) to tour Parc. We got down there, saw a demo of Smalltalk-74, and were of course blown away. There were other things we were explicitly told we could not know about, such as the “ball-bearing machine” (which I now believe to have been a laser printer). Because much of their low-level coding was done in BCPL, and I was very familiar with the internals of Martin Richards' compiler, I also asked to chat with their BCPL guy, whose name I now forget. I introduced myself, and we chatted for a few minutes. He then got suspicious, and asked me why I was there. I explained what was going on, and he called for a lawyer, who asked me if I was a U.S. citizen. I replied that I was Canadian. Shortly thereafter, the whole lot of us were rounded up and expelled. A few years later, I was working at another place (definitely not Parc!) and found a copy of the Smalltalk-76 manual that somebody had left on the Xerox [sic!] machine. I lost no time in copying it, and admiring the amazing thought that had had gone into the language's design.