Comment by masklinn
2 years ago
> I think the IDE I was thinking of is from the late 90s or early 00s.
Smalltalk's from the 70s and 80s, and almost certainly had what you're thinking about given it's where both Microsoft and Apple got their foundational ideas (restricted to significantly less powerful hardware), and later unrelated smalltalks retained a lot of now quirky considerations and behaviours. Self inherited a lot of those and is from the late 80s.
So yes, I was also expecting the author to talk about Smalltalk.
If you actually look at Xerox’s hardware, it’s quite a stretch to call Lisa or Macintosh “less powerful.” It’s kind of amazing what Xerox was able to accomplish on such underpowered systems; they did it largely by having multitasking microcode to handle performance-sensitive I/O, and implementing BitBlt there too.