Small thoughts about Smalltalk

A couple of weeks ago, The Computer History Museum hosted a panel session on Smalltalk, which I watched via video. Alan Kay (who’s vision for the Dynabook drove Smalltalk) came in via recorded video. Dan Ingall (the technical guru) joined by live video link. Adele Goldberg (who documented and tested it), showed up live. John Markoff, well known Silicon Valley documenter, hosted. All to talk about Smalltalk. It prompted some small thoughts about Smalltalk.

I was a regular Byte magazine reader, back in the day. I had created my own major in Computer-Based Education, and was designing and programming educational computer games. I’d done academic research as part of the degree requirements, so I was aware of the work at Xerox PARC. (In fact, I flunked a job interview there because I didn’t know what ‘protocol analysis’ meant, though it turns out that’s what I’d been doing!) So, when the Byte issue in Aug 1981 on Smalltalk came out (I checked the date), I was enchanted.