Comment by DonHopkins

Here's the whole thread from six days ago, started when I shared the "Folders" esolanguage article and hn discussion, which I think is interesting for students and language hackers:

On 16 Oct 2026, Don Hopkins wrote to Owen Densmore, David Rosenthal, and Alan Kay:

Somebody took your filesystem-as-objects patent idea to the logical extreme!

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/postsc...

Owen and David can correct my history, since they're on the thread.

-Don

On 16 Oct 2026, Alan Kay wrote:

Hi Don

I should have said "prior art before Smalltalk" ...

Best cheers

Alan

On 16 Oct 2026, Don Hopkins wrote:

In a way, the patent is just pure prior art, plus perspective, which is worth a certain number of IQ points I've been told. ;)

Which pre-Smalltalk ancestors were you thinking of? Sketchpad's masters and instances, Simula's classes, and Multics search rules walking a hierarchy of directories all seem like pieces of it.

-Don

On 16 Oct 2026, Alan Kay wrote:

Hi Don

I have been keeping to "80" IQ points in the saying (thus avoiding inflation). However very few people have noticed there is no sign bit in the aphorism, and that it works just as well for "poor perspectives being worth negative 80 IQ points" (and I think we could claim inflation of stupidity in many bad directions these days ...).

I don't like to claim priority for any ideas (including my own). Bob Barton liked a great saying of Goethe's: "We should all share in the excitement of Discovery without vain attempts to claim Priority" and I imprinted on that in grad school.

So, without claiming priority, I would point to Engelbart's NLS for unifying the structure of the file system with the basic hierarchical structuring of their content (and this included how code was represented, written, and read). A few years later I used a different kind of unification in the FLEX machine that Ed Cheadle and I did in the mid-60s to have "every large thing" be an instantiable process, including things that were more "file-like".

This is just FYI, partly because of the above Goethe quote, partly because the FLEX project was done within the aerospace conglomerate LTV, and was proprietary. My thesis advisor Dave Evans had to go to considerable work to get permission for me to do my degree write ups on a tiny subset. The later Smalltalk was a "cold restart" on these ideas (and LTG was not a problem by then).

And -- for Smalltalk -- the notion to make "everything large and small" an object was a quick way to get going on the comparatively speedy Alto, and Dan Ingalls (and his Smalltalk group) were able to do most of the SW engineering to make Smalltalk act semantically as though everything was an object.

Best cheers

Alan