I just finished reading an og copy of the smalltalk/80 language manual/specification and seriously - how did things go so backward? I bought the book to get a b

I just finished reading an og copy of the smalltalk/80 language manual/specification and seriously - how did things go so backward? I bought the book to get a better feel for what sort of object hierarchy to use in my pet language and found far more than that. I wasn't planning on caring about the graphical side of things but even that was insanely cool!