Comment by t1m
10 years ago
I had access to either an Alto or a Dorado during my co-op terms at Environment Canada (the weather service) back in the late 80s. I had a keen interest in OO at the time, but I can't remember this machine having a Smalltalk. Whenever I was able to access it, I spent time amusing myself hacking LOOPS (pre-cursor to CLOS - OO Lisp).
I also had access to a Mac, had an HP-9000 unix workstation (running X Windows) sitting on/under my desk, and had some exposure to Smalltalk-80 at the time. What blew me away was how mature and strange the Alto was; it was so obviously advanced, but was so difficult to understand. At that time, it was an 'old' machine, but somehow seemed like it was sent from the future.
> At that time, it was an 'old' machine, but somehow seemed like it was sent from the future.
This is why when I combine my own experience with Smalltalk and Oberon, coupled with all the Xerox PARC documentation that I can get my hands on, I feel sad that the industry didn't adopt any of the Xerox PARC paradigms.
So here we are, jumping of joy for something like Swift Playground or Bret Victor's demos, when everyone could have had something like that for years now.
This was how I felt about NeXT computers, even after they were obsolete in pure hardware terms they were still YEARS ahead in software.
My first close contact with Objective-C was in 1998, as I had to port an particle visualization framework from NeXT to Windows 95/C++, as my final project.
The teacher had a dead Cube on his office and NeXT was considered dead by the department.
I tried long to replicate some of the experience with WindowMaker/AfterStep and GNUStep but it never felt like what I could see from the NeXT manuals.