Recently I was reading that old Rolling Stone article about Spacewar (http://www.wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html) and lamenting that I was born too late. :) I was just wondering...at the end of the article are some code snippets attributed to Alan Kay. It looks Smalltalk-ish...what dialect of Smalltalk is that? :) And how can I convince my employer to build a beanbag-chair room like the one in the picture?
(I really enjoyed reading this article...what fabulous snapshot of a very exciting time to be involved with computers...the ARPAnet was only 2 years old at the time of writing, and already they were talking about internet games, and music sharing a-la Napster!)
Kevin --
That was one of a number of designs done in the first couple of years at PARC. There were several that were called "Simulation LOGO" (or SLOGO, as I had a feeling they would start off being nice and slow). Then there were several called Smalltalk (but now called Smalltalk-71), then Smalltalk-72 happened in Sept 72. The example in the actual Rolling Stones article (published in Nov 72) looks to me like one of the SLOGO versions. All of these languages had different devices that unified functions and classes -- I see that the one used here was that "create" in front of a function call would create an instance. In Smalltalk-72, this determination was made via a side-effect of an internal test in the body of the class.
Spacewar was one of about 20 "quintessential examples" for me during that time that had to be small, pretty, understandable, readable, and programmable by "regular people", especially kids -- so it got rewritten many times. (The current etoys system in Squeak allows a very pretty and compact version to be easily made.)
This article by Stewart Brand might just be the best writing anyone has done on this culture. It's not mentioned here, but the Whole Earth Truck Store was right across the street from SRI (Doug Engelbart and the SRI AI group, both ARPA projects) while all this was going on. Most of the ARPA computerists were part of the counter culture and the "Free University" which stretched from University Avenue in Palo Alto up into Menlo Park. The Whole Earth Catalog and what it stood for was used as a beacon for "what computers should turn into for people", and Stewart got to see it all (among other things, he was one of the cameramen in the famous Engelbart show in San Francisco in 1968).
Re: the ARPANET. There is very little that has happened so far with the Internet that wasn't part of the conversation about the ARPANET in the early sixties, years before it was designed, built, and first turned on in Sept 1969. And many important things that were done in the late sixties by Engelbart and others have been done worse or not at all so far by the larger culture that is bumbling around with the Internet. Point of view is indeed worth 80 IQ points!
Re: beanbag chairs. Just get some and use them. They are not part of any culture that requires "convincing employers".
Cheers,
Alan
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At 11:07 AM -0500 11/23/00, Kevin Fisher wrote:
Recently I was reading that old Rolling Stone article about Spacewar (http://www.wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html) and lamenting that I was born too late. :) I was just wondering...at the end of the article are some code snippets attributed to Alan Kay. It looks Smalltalk-ish...what dialect of Smalltalk is that? :) And how can I convince my employer to build a beanbag-chair room like the one in the picture?
(I really enjoyed reading this article...what fabulous snapshot of a very exciting time to be involved with computers...the ARPAnet was only 2 years old at the time of writing, and already they were talking about internet games, and music sharing a-la Napster!)
Alan:
Thanks so much for the follow up...I'm always fascinated to hear about how things were back in the late 60's - early 70's. It seems there was a lot of creativity back then that pretty much put down the foundations for what we take for granted today. And yet, at the same time, there hasn't been much 'new' that's been invented these days...just repackaged ideas from back then. Just when I think that "oh well, everything has been done!" I come to realize that there's still much progress that can be made, since we really haven't gotten very far in 30 years.
As for the beanbag chairs...I think I may just bring one into work. :)
(Lately I've been trying to get my head around Ted Nelson's Xanadu...very interesting stuff, if you can get past the odd nomenclature!)
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