The Smalltalk-80 Programming System

If you enjoy reading documents, BITSAVERS.ORG is a treasure mine full of lost knowledge. link Here you will find Xerox PARC, DEC, Burroughs, Apple, Sun, Borland,... old research documents, papers, manuals. In the context of static compilation, for example in MS-DOS, take Turbo Pascal 6.0 programmer's guide. link For some 8 bit love you can check ZX Spectrum and Atari archives. link link Next step is to get an emulator for any of those old OS/computers and try to follow along one of those books. Also there are some videos on YouTube showing those systems. "The Smalltalk-80 Programming System" ▶ this video "NeXT vs Sun" link "Steve Jobs internal demo of NeXTSTEP 3" link "Amiga Programming" link "Amiga Hardware Programming" link The Mother of All Demos" link Just a very tiny sample of videos

Self link Xerox Star User Interface link link Tektronix 4404 Smalltalk link The Smalltalk-80 Programming System ▶ this video The Final Demonstration of the Xerox 'Star' computer link Symbolics Hypertext Document link Warren Teitelman work at Xerox PARC link The Mesa/Cedar programming environment link Steve Jobs internal demo of NeXTSTEP 3, link Alan Kay on Xerox PARC work link link link

Mainly videos Self link Xerox Star User Interface link link Tektronix 4404 Smalltalk link The Smalltalk-80 Programming System ▶ this video The Final Demonstration of the Xerox 'Star' computer link Symbolics Hypertext Document link

> The problem I've seen with this idea is that in order for it to work, you have to be willing to add more metadata to your program, because programs themselves don't have the necessary data in them. You can make it mandatory to your language, but than just raises the friction for people trying to use that language. I'm confused by what you mean. Can you be more specific as to what sort of metadata that has to be embedded in the code would be needed? I've never used it, but watching this Smalltalk-80 IDE demonstration seems like it could be a workable idea. ▶ this video Edit: A more modern example using Pharo. You can see in the video that he's not accessing files, rather everything is sorted into packages and classes. link

Xerox controlled the whole stack, they invented it for their systems. So these workstations where an whole stack OS. You can read about their implementations on the links I provided before. Additionally, you can get the original Smalltalk-80 from from Stephane's web site. link This is a very ruft idea how it felt to use a Smalltalk workstation: link ▶ this video The REPL was what is known in Smalltalk as transcript. Similarly the Interlisp-D workstation also had they own mixture of REPL and editing link Some of the ideas that lived on the Lisp Machines afterwards link link Mesa was a memory safe system programming language created at Xerox, as an evolution from Extended Algol to replace BCPL. Niklaus Wirth based his Modula-2 design on it. Shortly thereafter they updated Mesa into Cedar, which added support for RC with local GC for cycle collection. The system then got called Mesa/Cedar. It allowed the same interactive experience as the other workstations, but using a GC enabled systems programming language. The REPL provided nice features, like auto-suggestion when a typo would cause a compilation failure. It is also probably the first graphical debugger for a strong typed language. Any OS API could be used on the REPL by typing modulename.procedure , which could use other OS APIs to get its input from different sources. An idea Wirth adopted into Oberon. You can see how all three environments looked like here: link And yes, Powershell alongside .NET is probably the closest we have in modern computers to those systems. Followed by Swift Playgrounds and AppleScript on Apple systems. Although Apple also provided similar experiences with Common Lisp, Hypercard and their NewtonScript and Dylan.

Except the original Lisp and Smalltalk environments are much more than a simple REPL. Sometimes I wish people would learn about computing history. Presentation from Kalman Reti about Lisp Machines, check the interactivity starting at 00:44:00 and how to introduce mouse sensitive images at 01:00:00 link Xerox presentations about Smalltalk-80 ▶ this video link link