I said “in the context of”. As in, Smalltalk itself was designed in an environment where green-screen terminals were a recent and popular paradigm. As such, in

I said “in the context of”. As in, Smalltalk itself was designed in an environment where green-screen terminals were a recent and popular paradigm. As such, in some ways, they’re reflections of one-another: isomorphic solutions to problems the same people were having around the same time. Also: IBM 3270 protocol is not a “serial character terminal” protocol. It’s essentially an X11-like client-server bidirectional state synchronization protocol for what are essentially pure-text HyperCards. If you can understand that, then you can probably see how Smalltalk is — in the abstract! — a green-screen terminal system. (So is X11 itself; and so are modern “framework display server protocols” like QML and XAML; and Mozilla’s XUL; and of course HTML.) Smalltalk just happens to have the client and server in the same address space. (But they’re still separate objects — a Smalltalk display window is a “control” that doesn’t share state with its backing delegate that’s telling it what to display.) One could think of this as the “client - backend responsibility separation” paradigm. It originated in the offices of people trying to horizontally scale out interactions. This is in contrast to the libtermcap/ Windows GDI / bitmap-buffer bit-blit approach to view-state management, where there is a presenter that is a kind of “driver” for the model, living subordinately embedded inside its address space and synchronously “rendering out” whatever the model decides to render. This paradigm originated in single-tasking microcomputers.