A lot of this work, such as work done on Smalltalk, is old enough to where any patents on it would be expired. There's a treasure trove of technologies invente

A lot of this work, such as work done on Smalltalk, is old enough to where any patents on it would be expired. There's a treasure trove of technologies invented in the 1970's, 1980's, and 1990's that haven't been fully exploited. For example, there are some regular posters on Hacker News that rant and rave about the Lisp machine development environments of the 1980's, some going as far as to say these environments were the most productive environments they've worked in, despite all the advances in editors, IDEs, compilers, and other tools that happened since the 1980's.