alt Hacker NewsIt's really a shame that the early history of Smalltalk-80 was such that it remained too locked up in licensing and $$ implementations and so didn't get a broader penetration. That and it was about a generation or two ahead of the extant microcomputing hardware at the time, so wasn't going to be shippable in a performant way on a general consumer class machine even by the time the Lisa and Mac shipped in the mid-80s.
I was very excited by Squeak in the late 90s (and even more excited by Self), but it was clear that the time of Smalltalk being able to make any kind of broader splash was done, and Java was where people's attention switched.
Imagine if a consumer focused machine like the Macintosh had shipped, but based fully on Smalltalk, with an authoring environment built on it for "regular people". The closest we got to this was Hypercard.
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It was perfectly accessible on Windows 3.x days, I learnt Smalltalk with Smalltalk/V.
It was the .NET of OS/2 and getting into enterprise, until Java came to be, and IBM one of the big Smalltalk backers, decided to pivot into Java.
It’s comforting to remember that a lot of the research from st/self eg hotspot went into the jvm. So whenever I am writing clojure I feel I am still, in a way, hanging out with all of my (lang) friends.
the whole Smalltalk saga is a bit of a tragedy looking back (EDIT: as someone who didn't live through that era) through the context of the current state of consumer computing being so "non-convivial", if I can borrow a phrase from Ivan Illich. Empowering users by allowing them to conform the tools to their own usecase often feels like the exact opposite paradigm of the modern milieu.
Or maybe I'm just entering my "old man yells at cloud" phase of life haha
March 7, 1988 — "Smalltalk/V 286 is available now and costs $199.95, the company said. Registered users of Digitalk's Smalltalk/V can upgrade for $75 until June 1."
https://books.google.com/books?id=CD8EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA25&dq=d...