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kragen • yesterday at 10:55 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

> I'm not aware of any substantial Smalltalk influence at that time.

You should be, because I spent hours telling you about it, in detail, with citations and extensive quotes from the designers of the Alto and Bravo, less than two weeks ago. At the time you conceded the point and said it was not what you intended to dispute: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49857855


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Rochus • today at 2:18 AM

> I spent hours telling you about it

I hope not.

And please note that this is again a different topic.

Last time I was talking about Wirth's OO vs. Simula OO, and the similarity of Wirth's implementation with Kay's vision. You then first extended this discussion to whether Kay directly influenced Wirth, which I responded. Then you extended the topic even more to the question whether and to what degree Cedar was influenced by Smalltalk. That was far off my interest and irrelevant for the discussion given that Wirth just took the tiling window manager, which none of the Smalltalk versions had.

Now I'm talking about the development of the Alto computer which included an OS with a GUI and two groundbreaking applications, Bravo and Gypsy (implemented on top of Bravo), all in BCPL, implementing their own interaction and presentation concepts.

If you want to do historical research, you have to go to the primary sources (e.g. https://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xe..., https://xeroxparcarchive.computerhistory.org/Xerox_PARC_sour..., or e.g. https://archive.org/details/Xerox_PARC_Gypsy_Demonstration_T...), not to stories written down from memory twenty years later.

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