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> The first thing is that the Smalltalk environment wasn't really an operating system the same way something like Mac OS was. It’s more like an IDE that runs on
by gumby 3y ago
> The first thing is that the Smalltalk environment wasn't really an operating system the same way something like Mac OS was. It’s more like an IDE that runs on bare hardware.
This was true of Xerox’s InterLisp-D environment and the MIT Lispms and their descendants as well.
For the Lispms we typically didn’t save the world (essentially the memory image) but instead used cloud storage.
As the article says on the PARC machines we mostly saved a band (memory image). Filesystems and many other things we would consider local services were (LAN) cloud services instead.
This was late 70s/early 80s and mostly took decades to become mainstream.
- lispm 3y agoThe Xerox Interlisp-D system also then got a user interface metaphor: rooms. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/24054.24056 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/24054.24056 Rooms: The Use of Multiple Virtual Workspaces to Reduce Space Contention in a Window-Based Graphical User Interface D. AUSTIN HENDERSON, JR., and STUART K. CARD Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
- ChainOfFools 3y agoWhile we're at it you can add the ucsd p-system to that group, although there was actually one iteration of it that came bundled with its own hardware (by Western Digital, with an overly complicated CPU design implemented partially in discretes!) rather than the other way around using platform-independent VMs. Sort of anticipating the similarly forgotten PicoJava project.