HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

Since the talk was already posted yesterday, here's another great related video that is well worth watching: Dan Ingalls demonstrating Smalltalk 76 on a restored Xerox Alto.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uknEhXyZgsg

This is where it all started and it's truly amazing what they achieved on such limited hardware.

⬐ mlajtos

I loved how he nuked the image by entering wrong code. Having a live system is awesome, but in instances like this, we should start thinking about Kay’s notion of “computers all the way down”, i.e. virtualization. So no matter how much corruption you do to a system, it should be still able to fully restore its functions without a reboot.

⬐ peterkelly

That was my favorite part :)

⬐ infinite8s

It's interesting that from the perspective of today the Alto looks limited, but at the time it was built it was basically a look at what powerful hardware might be like in 10-15 years (so mid 80s - which was pretty close in terms of a Lisa). So the equivalent would be trying to imagine what an individual's computing power would be like in 2035, and building a system to that.

For example, about half the memory of the Alto was just used for the bitmap display, which makes the system even more remarkable for what it could achieve with an economy of code. From what I've read, they had a plan to design a new system in the mid-70s (that would again look 15 yrs into the future) but at that point they got enough pushback from Xerox that they were not able to get the funding for that.

The ideas he's promoting aren't new, and in fact predate even the NES.

They date back to Smalltalk, which was created at Xerox PARC in the 1970s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uknEhXyZgsg

⬐ TruffleLabs

Great video to see core historical technologies and approaches to software design. And, these ideas can be used today with Smalltalk-78 emulated with Lively Web

https://lively-web.org/users/bert/Smalltalk-78.html

I’ve been on a Smalltalk binge the last few days and have really been enjoying this two hour long interview / demo with Dan Ingalls on Smalltalk and the Alto: https://youtu.be/uknEhXyZgsg

Bravo was modal, Gypsy was non-modal, Smalltalk-74 onwards had multi-windows (including pop-up menus) and a metaphorical desktop.

I assume you know these interesting presentations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z43y94Dfzk, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uknEhXyZgsg

EDIT: see also e.g. https://computerhistory.org/blog/introducing-the-smalltalk-z...

Check out the 1970's https://youtu.be/uknEhXyZgsg?t=1166

⬐ Keyframe

Definitely. Lots of ideas from decades before, but started culminating in-front of our eyes during 90s in-front of general audience.

Be prepared to be amazed with what Xerox PARC and others were doing, while Bell Labs was busy pushing for UNIX.

"Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4

"Emulating a Xerox Star (8010) Information System Running the Xerox Development Environment (XDE) 5.0"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HP4hRUEIuxo

"Documents as User Interfaces Video Demo"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-_zVkrWCOk

"SYMBOLICS S-PACKAGES 3D GRAPHICS AND ANIMATION DEMO"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV5obrYaogU

"Alto System Project: Dan Ingalls demonstrates Smalltalk"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uknEhXyZgsg

"Action!, the worlds first dynamic interface builder - 1988" (Interface Builder percursor, written in Lisp)

https://vimeo.com/62618532

"The Interlisp programming environment"

http://larry.masinter.net/interlisp-ieee.pdf

And the cherry, how Lucid used Lisp ideas for their Energize C++ IDE, including an image based format for AST storage

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQQTScuApWk

https://www.dreamsongs.com/Cadillac.html

⬐ hcarvalhoalves

Watching the Symbolics demo nowadays, it's amazing what they had back then.

⬐ vblxt

These lock-in IDE environments, while impressive, thankfully never got really popular.

I find superior languages like Lisp or Standard ML most enjoyable in text files.

⬐ pjmlp

Look better around you.

- macOS, Windows, Android, ChromeOS

- InteliJ, Visual Studio, XCode/Playgrounds

⬐ nsm

I'd also add this talk "Lambda World 2018 - What FP can learn from Smalltalk by Aditya Siram " https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baxtyeFVn3w

as well as the whole series of things that Tudor Girba & co. are doing with Glamorous Toolkit https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClLZHVq_-2D2-iI4rA2O8Ug

I'd still recommend folks use Pharo over GToolkit for most things, as GToolkit lacks a bunch of polish and documentation (not to say that even Pharo documentation approaches anything of the quality of the Rust and Python ecosystems).

It is a bit hard to explain in an HN comment something that requires live experience,

You can start by having a look at,

http://toastytech.com/guis/cedar.html

"Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4

"Alto System Project: Dan Ingalls demonstrates Smalltalk"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uknEhXyZgsg

"SYMBOLICS CONCORDIA ONLINE DOCUMENTATION HYPER TEXT MARKUP 1985"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud0HhzAK30w

You can see how NeXT builds on many of these concepts on the famous "NeXT vs Sun" marketing piece,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGhfB-NICzg

Sun also had some ideas along these lines with NeWS,

"NeWS: A Networked and Extensible Window System,"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zG0uecYSMA

Naturally OS/2, BeOS, Windows, macOS, iOS, and even Android share some of the ideas.

Now, before I proceed note that actually modern Linux distributions have all the tooling to make these concepts happen, but it fails short to have everyone agree on a proper stack.

So basically, the main idea is to have a proper full stack in place for developing a Workstation computer as one single experience, from bottom all the way to the top.

On Xerox's case, they used bytecode with in-CPU execution via programmable microcode loaded on boot, and later on just a thin native glue on top of host OS.

The environments had frameworks / modules for the whole OS stack, supported distributed computing, embedded of data structures across applications (OLE can trace its roots back to these ideas), REPLs that not only could interact with the whole OS (commands, modules, running applications), it was also possible to break into the debugger, change the code and redo the failed instructions.

Linux distributions get kind of close to these ideas via GNOME and KDE, but the whole concept breaks, because they aren't part of a full OS, rather a bunch of frameworks, that have to deal with classical UNIX applications and communities that rather use fvwm (like I was doing in 1995), and use a bunch of xterms, than having frameworks talking over D-BUS, embedding documents, all integrated with a REPL capable of handling structured data, and call any kind of executable code (including .so, because the type information isn't available).

And then every couple of years the sound daemon, graphics stack or whatever userspace layer gets redone, without any kind of compatibility, because it is open source so anyone that cares should just port whatever applications are relevant.

It is quite telling that most Linux conferences end up being about kernel, new filesystems, network protocols, and seldom about how to have something like a full BeOS stack on Linux. Even freedesktop can only do so much.

⬐ EricE

> It is quite telling that most Linux conferences end up being about kernel, new filesystems, network protocols, and seldom about how to have something like a full BeOS stack on Linux.

A perfect summation!

Anything based on the workstation concepts explored at Xerox PARC, and further pursued at ETHZ, TI and Genera.

Bitsavers has all the necessary papers and manuals, and computer museum as well.

Here are some video sessions.

"Yesterday's Computer of Tomorrow: The Xerox Alto │Smalltalk-76 Demo"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqKyHEJe9_w

"Alto System Project: Dan Ingalls demonstrates Smalltalk"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uknEhXyZgsg

"Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4

"The Final Demonstration of the Xerox 'Star' computer"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OwG_rQ_Hqw

The end of the road from Plan 9, Inferno.

http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/index.html

http://doc.cat-v.org/inferno/4th_edition/

⬐ krebs_liebhaber

Small tangent: It's sad that the Mother of All Demos still looks like the future of computing. Google Docs and its siblings come close, but they still don't match it in scope.

⬐ homarp

Some complements to the video:

xerox :: parc :: techReports :: The Smalltalk-76 Programming System Design and Implementation - https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_xeroxparctalk76Program...

Emulating Smalltalk-76 on Alto on Windows - http://croquetweak.blogspot.com/2017/11/emulating-smalltalk-... or in the browser : https://static.loomcom.com/contraltojs/

Smalltalk 78 in browser - https://lively-web.org/users/bert/Smalltalk-78.html