Sadly Mr. Kay's culture comment distracts from the best part of his response where he writes: These seven influences got me to thinking about one abstraction t

Sadly Mr. Kay's culture comment distracts from the best part of his response where he writes: These seven influences got me to thinking about one abstraction that was indeed like a biological cell on the one hand and an entire computer on the other which could be universally used at all levels of scales in both software and hardware to "model anything" (including all the old inconvenient things computing was using). That's perhaps the most enlightening statement about the history of Smalltalk I've ever seen.