Yesterday's Computer of Tomorrow: The Xerox Alto │Smalltalk-76 Demo

You won't get any reliable numbers during wartime. I heard Ukrainian government recently mention they ordered a million. Hundreds of small companies (around 10 employees each) in Ukraine are making and assembling drone's right now (according to journalists who filmed them in Ukraine last month). I counted at least two dozen companies in the Netherlands, probably a few hundred all over Europe. Besides the frame that holds the 4 or six rotors together all other parts are off the shelf, mostly ordered from Shenzen. You can CNC mill a carbon fiber or aluminum frame from a single plate on an x-y flatbed cnc. I researched all this last night because I need $20K-$200k investment right now to start my own startup making unjammable autonomous kamikaze drones with 20K payload on top of 20km optical fiber spools unreeling. I think it is possible to make them lighter without fibers if you put a few thousand microprocessors in with a wafer scale integration for $500. Of course you could just make cheap drones that kill every warm body in sight[4] indiscriminately. To disable a tank you need these fiber tethered drones with bigger payloads[3][5][6]. You cab see two fiber strands still in the air in a few frames of the video. What you need is a Paul MacCready style development cycle for drones in the field. You need to be able to make 10 crashes per hour, fix the drone by replacing with off-the shelf components and try again. The programming should be live-coding like Squeak Smalltalk, no r

I think it's fair to say Smalltalk(s) have had in many aspects the most advanced IDE in existence at every moment since its introduction. Demos for a couple old versions: ▶ this video Demo for Pharo: link

The “natural” background for text is light though. Hard to find books, newspapers, or magazines that put a dark background behind text of any significant length. Accordingly, the Xerox Alto had a light background too, back in the 1970s. Demonstrated here with Smalltalk: ▶ this video And here with a GUI based text editor: link

Well ideas there are plenty to steal from, that is true. But maybe we could start by actually catching up with having full stack OSes written in safe systems programming languages. link ▶ this video

> Thanks for sharing, I love these types of stories. Really makes me pine for the "old" days, and wonder if there's a parallel universe where technology took a very different route such that languages like APL, Lisp, and Smalltalk are used instead of JavaScript, Java, and C#, and what that world looks like. Easy, here is some time travel, "Alan Kay's tribute to Ted Nelson at "Intertwingled" Festival" link "Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar" link "Yesterday's Computer of Tomorrow: The Xerox Alto │Smalltalk-76 Demo" ▶ this video However to be fair, Java, C# and Swift alongside their IDEs are the closest in mainstream languages to that experience, unless you get to use Allegro, LispWorks or Pharo.

That's a good suggestion. Walking through a set of interactions is a solid idea. For what it's worth, there are some videos around of people actually doing it with Lisp and Smalltalk systems, and pjmlp already posted a pile of them elsewhere in this thread. I can add a few more: Kalman Reti walking through some interactions with a Symbolics LispM repl: link Brian Mastenbrook demonstrating Interlisp's SEDIT structure editor in the Xerox Lisp environment: link Rainer Joswig (lispm here on HN) showing us a little bit of repl and Zmacs interaction on a Symbolics Lisp Machine: link Rainer again, showing some simple interactions with Macintosh Common Lisp, which was my daily driver for years: link Ruby programmer Avdi Grimm shows some things that he found cool about Pharo Smalltalk: link Dan Ingalls (one of the original authors of Smalltalk) in a 2017 demo of Smalltalk 76: ▶ this video There are some other things I'd like to find for lists like this, but haven't been able to. In particular, a good demo of Apple's SK8 would be great. If you can imagine a full-color Hypercard that could crack open and reprogram absolutely everything on the screen, including the machine code that drew the window system's widgets, all in a repl while the code was live; in which you could grab an arbitrary widget and drop it on the repl window to get a live variable reference to the widget, and then inspect it, operate on it, and reprogram it, again, while everything continued to run; in which you

Anything based on the workstation concepts explored at Xerox PARC, and further pursued at ETHZ, TI and Genera. Bitsavers has all the necessary papers and manuals, and computer museum as well. Here are some video sessions. "Yesterday's Computer of Tomorrow: The Xerox Alto │Smalltalk-76 Demo" ▶ this video "Alto System Project: Dan Ingalls demonstrates Smalltalk" link "Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar" link "The Final Demonstration of the Xerox 'Star' computer" link The end of the road from Plan 9, Inferno. link link