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acm | http://gagne.homedns.org/%7etgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html

1993

The Early History of Smalltalk
Alan C. Kay
Abstract Most ideas come from previous ideas. The sixties, particularly in the  community, gave rise to a host of notions about “human-computer symbiosis” through interactive time-shared computers, graphics screens and pointing devices. Advanced computer languages wereinvented to simulate complex systems such as oil refineries and semi-intelligent behavior. The soon-to-follow paradigm shift of modern personal computing, overlapping window interfaces, and object-oriented design came from seeing the work of the sixties as something more than a “better old thing.” This is, more than a better way: to do mainframe computing; for end-users to invoke functionality; tomake data structures more abstract. Instead the promise of exponential growth in computing volume demanded that the sixties be regarded as “almost a new thing” and to find out what the actual “new things” might be. For example, one would computer with a handheld “Dynabook” in a way that would not be possible on a shared mainframe; millions of potential users meant that the user interface would haveto become a learning environment along the lines of Montessori and Bruner; and needs for large scope, reduction in complexity, and end-user literacy would require that data and control structures be done away with in favor of a more biological scheme of protected universal cells interacting only through messages that could mimic any desired behavior. Early Smalltalk was the first completerealization of these new points of view as parented by its many predecessors in hardware, language and user interface design. It became the exemplar of the new computing, in part, because we were actually trying for a qualitative shift in belief structures—a new Kuhnian paradigm in the same spirit as the invention of the printing press-and thus took highly extreme positions which almost forced these newstyles to be invented.

Introduction
I’m writing this introduction in an airplane at , feet. On my lap is a five pound notebook computer—’s “Interim Dynabook”—by the end of the year it sold for under . It has a flat, crisp, high-resolution bitmap screen, overlapping windows, icons, a pointing device, considerable storage and computing capacity, and its best software isobject-oriented. It has advanced networking built-in and there are already options for wireless networking. Smalltalk runs on this system, and is one of the main systems I use for my current work with children. In some ways this is more than a Dynaboo (quantitatively), and some ways not quite there yet (qualitatively). All in all, pretty much what was in mind during the late sixties. Smalltalk was part of thislarger pursuit of , and later of Xerox , that I called personal computing. There were so many people involved in each stage from the research communities that the accurate allocation of credit for ideas in intractably difficult. Instead, as Bob Barton liked to quote Goethe, we should “share in the excitement of discover without vain attempts to claim priority.” I will try to show where mostof the influences came from and how they were transformed in the magnetic field formed by the new personal computing metaphor. It was the attitudes as well as the great ideas of the pioneers that helped Smalltalk get invented. Many of the people I admired most at this time—such as Ivan Sutherland, Marvin Minsky, Seymour Papert, Gordon Moore, Bob Barton, Dave Evans, Butler Lampson, Jerome Bruner, andothers—seemed to have a splendid sense that their creations, though wonderful by relative standards, were not near to the absolute thresholds that had to be crossed. Small minds try to form religions, the great ones just want better routes up the



mountain. Where Newton said he saw further by standing on the shoulders of giants, computer scientists all too often stand on each other’s...
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