Comment by cmrdporcupine

5 hours ago

It's really a shame that the early history of Smalltalk-80 was such that it remained too locked up in licensing and $$ implementations and so didn't get a broader penetration. That and it was about a generation or two ahead of the extant microcomputing hardware at the time, so wasn't going to be shippable in a performant way on a general consumer class machine even by the time the Lisa and Mac shipped in the mid-80s.

I was very excited by Squeak in the late 90s (and even more excited by Self), but it was clear that the time of Smalltalk being able to make any kind of broader splash was done, and Java was where people's attention switched.

Imagine if a consumer focused machine like the Macintosh had shipped, but based fully on Smalltalk, with an authoring environment built on it for "regular people". The closest we got to this was Hypercard.

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cmrdporcupine

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igouy  3 hours ago

March 7, 1988 — "Smalltalk/V 286 is available now and costs $199.95, the company said. Registered users of Digitalk's Smalltalk/V can upgrade for $75 until June 1."

https://books.google.com/books?id=CD8EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA25&dq=d...

  • whartung  32 minutes ago

    I bought that. (We just don't discuss how much money was spent in the 80's and 90's on hardware, books, software, etc.) I had to drive from the So Cal South Bay up to Sherman Oaks to find a store on Ventura Blvd that had it. It was pretty cool at the time, but, it didn't have very good documentation on getting "your first app" up, so it mostly just sat and lingered.

    There was a lot of reliance on the Smalltalk books. While the blue book was common, the green (history) and orange (how the GUI works) were not. I don't even recall stumbling across those at OpAmp back in the day (and if anyone would have had those, they would have). I was very excited about ST back in the day.

    All of my forays into ST ended up being a struggle and I never got any real momentum to make progress.

pjmlp  3 hours ago

It was perfectly accessible on Windows 3.x days, I learnt Smalltalk with Smalltalk/V.

It was the .NET of OS/2 and getting into enterprise, until Java came to be, and IBM one of the big Smalltalk backers, decided to pivot into Java.

shaunxcode  4 hours ago

It’s comforting to remember that a lot of the research from st/self eg hotspot went into the jvm. So whenever I am writing clojure I feel I am still, in a way, hanging out with all of my (lang) friends.

b00ty4breakfast  4 hours ago

the whole Smalltalk saga is a bit of a tragedy looking back (EDIT: as someone who didn't live through that era) through the context of the current state of consumer computing being so "non-convivial", if I can borrow a phrase from Ivan Illich. Empowering users by allowing them to conform the tools to their own usecase often feels like the exact opposite paradigm of the modern milieu.

Or maybe I'm just entering my "old man yells at cloud" phase of life haha

  • mwnorman2  2 hours ago

    Well, I DID live through that era and I AM the 'old-man-yelling-at-clouds' ;-) and the main issue was that getting Smalltalk developers was a HUGE headache. I worked for a Telecom company (Canada's largest, rhymes with 'Ortel') and we needed to develop our own courses - yours truly developed and delivered dozens of hours of training.

    This lead to some extraordinary per-diem charges that I knew some folks enjoyed for a while, mostly paid for by the Financial industry. Eventually those on the paying side looked for cheaper alternatives .. and yes, the new-kid-on-the-block Java played a big role, but so did Visual Basic!

    • igouy  1 hour ago

      'We read and heard many stories about confident and experienced programmers plunging into self-study tutorials, only to give up in frustration after several hours, still wondering, "Where is the application code?" The object paradigm, in which program control is distributed across a set of tightly encapsulated and high-function software objects, was alien to experts in procedural design.

      … to use Smalltalk fluently, a programmer must become familiar with a huge class hierarchy and with the tools of a sophisticated interactive programming environment. New programmers often became lost in the hierarchy or spent considerable time in unfocused exploration of the interactive tools.'

      "Making Use: scenario-based design of human-computer interactions", 2000, page 103

      https://www.google.com/books/edition/Making_Use/s-0ZuadhBBAC...

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