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

[@NotAnInterestingPerson]

I was in the audience for this demo and as a lifelong computer nerd I have to say it was a surreal experience to meet these people and see these machines working in person. It's one of my most cherished memories.

[@realmichaud]

unbelievable that was being done slap dab in the middle of the 70s

[@horridohobbies]

Ditto for me. I had the great honour and privilege of meeting Adele Goldberg, Dan Ingalls, and Kent Beck at Camp Smalltalk Supreme: kzbin.info/door/zipicZiZ1843jAqmSGgYwg.

[@viarnay]

The first revolution was the invention of the printing and the second the automatization of data processing. They were plenty of smart people at Xerox Parc

[@a9udn9u]

"Multi-font text", imaging what a groundbreaking advancement it was back then

[@jezbon]

I do love how older technologies that many people simply brush aside today were just so incredible for the time and still to this day have some amazing abilities that nothing modern can quite match. The whole JIT ideas of Smalltalk and LISP still just make me "geek tech excited". lol. These things like Unix will just continue to stand the test of time and go down as legendary.

[@Jdvc-yd5tx]

The Happy Hacker, the most sublime organ playing I have ever heard. 💞💫

[@NoreenHoltzen]

Utterly phenomenal in 1976. It is often forgotten that the state sector is so vastly more innovative than the private sector. It is where all the difficult early innovative work is done and then handed over to the private markets later for the more trivial incremental work. You can take almost everything in your phone and trace it to the state sector, GPS, silicon chip design, MacOS derived trivially from Unix, http, the web browser developed at NCAA, the touch screen, just everything you can’t list is innovated in the state sector. On the other hand we are constantly bombarded with advertising that the private sector is where the innovation is. State sector also includes firms that have only State funding like Xerox in the early days and even Intel with the 4004 used for traffic lights but even Intel having state customers rook it from the mp944 processor used in aircraft.

[@tylerchambers6246]

The state sector has limitless resources (it has robbed from the private sector) to throw around on massive projects, be it landing on the moon or creating a nuke, so even if only one out of every 10 insane projects goes anywhere, they end up looking quite innovative. It'd be fine, a failure rate as high as what we're talking about, if the state was gambling with its own money, but alas, they do it with ours. That's the source of the innovation you're talking about. You really have to go out of your way to cherry pick enough examples to seriously discount the innovation of private sector technology in the first place though. The first real microprocessor, meaning a system integrated on a single chip, is indeed Intel's: that isn't a "trivial increment" in design over the highly task-specific MP944 "microprocessor". How about the LLMs, large language model neural network architectures, which are closing in on the greatest technological achievement possible- AGI? Private. I could list 10 private sector innovations as easily as you can list 10 state sector ones. Here's the thing: the state gets to gamble with limitless money that isn't its own, and so it can afford to throw in on an insane million-to-one idea like landing on the moon, whereas no private company or individual could, for purely logistical reasons. When it comes to that kind of a megaproject, the state is going to come out on top.

[@crnkmnky]

_Things I Learned Today:_ Intel, Xerox PARC, and Bell Labs were government research facilities. 🤦🏿‍♀️ Seems like a bit of mental gymnastics to support your political thesis…

[@wyleong4326]

Seeing the byte code displayed next (and within) the actual, running system after writing in the new code is awe-inspiring!

[@lucianonotarfrancesco4443]

Beautiful! I use Smalltalk almost every day, but watching this footage I still get the eerie feeling of being in an alternate reality where Smalltalk is not in every computer, and instead everybody uses some awkward steam-punk software

[@a4e69636b]

You seriously use Smalltalk a lot? What projects do you use it for? Which platform?

[@rdococ]

@@a4e69636b the joke - - > your head

[@horridohobbies]

@@a4e69636b There are actually thousands of programmers around the world who use Smalltalk every day. There are thousands of enterprise customers at Cincom, Instantiations, and GemTalk Systems. There are hundreds more who use open source Pharo. Smalltalk is used practically in every application domain you can think of...ERP (enterprise resource management), web apps, data science, machine learning, IoT, virtual reality, industrial control systems, transportation industry, etc. To paraphrase Mark Twain, “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”

[@a4e69636b]

@@horridohobbies Thank you for the info.

[@thegeniusfool]

As someone who did do SOME professional work in Smalltak-80, this is very cool to see! Thanks for the upload.

[@hanniffydinn6019]

When computing was seriously fun and exciting !

[@ruadeil_zabelin]

It still can be, depending on which field you are in.

It's all about pornhub now

[@hrgwea]

It has always been fun and exciting for those who like to build things. Nothing has changed.

[@JOSECCB10]

Why not today? I mean, that time there were really new things, but today still there is new technologies and thins for learning. well maybe not for everyone but for me is really interesting I'm starting to learn programming and really I'm seeing a lot of things coming year after year

[@hanniffydinn6019]

JoseIT nah you don’t get it. You aren’t learning programming and real computing at all! If you want to go though the real programming experience, you should be programming in machine code / assembly on say a Nintendo NES, or 8 bit computer. Then 16 bit. That’s where you truly understand how computers work. If you doing coding now, it’s incredibly easy and you won’t really understand what’s going on. 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯

[@Jdvc-yd5tx]

"I only work for positive integer values" is so much more adorable than "I'm sorry Dave but I'm afraid I can't do that". "Open the gad dan door HAL, that's an order you hearing me?" 🌏🌐🖋

[@BjrnOttoVasbottenbjovas]

Ingalls gave the keynote at an InfoQ London i attended many years ago, probably around 2008. Very funny and just extremely knowledgeable

[@Ralphunreal]

the zoom in on that graphic editor is ahead of its time.

[@DivineMisterAdVentures]

But also this was computing out of reach of 99.99% of us. Welcome to KZbin!!

[@Naa-ee7nq]

In 1976 yep, but in the 80s and 90s there were very affordable, or even free, ST solutions that ran circles around this one. Nowadays you have Squeak and Pharo for instance, although the commercial solutions are still more polished.

[@gm2407]

@@Naa-ee7nq In 1976 this is ahead of the curve by a long way. It was an imence technical achievement. If there was something equal to that it must have been a massive machine. Also at this time there was the Boeing engineer invisaging smartphones before Motorola made the first mobile. IBM released the Simon in 1992 and that only sold 50k units but had a lot of functionality for the time. So much was conceived and worked out in the 70s it is unbelievable because of the lack of early adapters on mass in this period to push the tech forward quicker. Imagine the 80s tech boom happening under Carter in the 70s and the dot com boom happening by 1990. The accelleration would be scarey and the history would be very different.

[@horridohobbies]

Yes, Smalltalk was way, way ahead of its time. Fortunately, today Smalltalk can run on the Raspberry Pi with pretty good performance.

[@Frisenette]

Wow this is fantastic!

[@realmichaud]

I know it makes me feel like I'm in an alternate reality

[@aoeu256]

Modern OSes are designed so that casual users and programmers are split completely. Its very easy to do things where the GUI has been pre-designed for it, but then when you want to do something else BAM the learning curve is insane even with Python & Ruby.

[@gm2407]

Yes if it was easy everyone would do it. What you want is visual drag and drop functional program building. A lot of modern programing uses repeat code function in a program so much is copied and pasted. We can utilise this by having drag and drop programing you would have structural templates with programing phrases. So instead of learning the phrases they are categorised you drag and drop then change the variable you need to change. You could use a license agreement similar to GNU or Linux to allow growth of expanded phraseology. Remember computers all use logicgates from 18th Century (I might be wrong on the date but it was a very long time ago). So this would help with the simplicity if we had a function built into the program that upon highlight and request could offer simplifed options of the logical equations we built. If you can build that program you would open up programming to the world. It would mean you have inbuilt languages including compilers and assemblers with actual code phrases and real world explanations of what the code does and what the variablea are. The end code could be tested in a virtual computer enviorment and develop functional programs faster.

[@DivineMisterAdVentures]

I'm here for the development environment. We need a resurgence of it!

[@joelpichette]

@Sergio Díaz Nila All it was missing is the menubar on top with a little apple in the corner, and icons in the bottom when the applications are running minimized.

[@astroid-ws4py]

Maybe Use Pharo

[@horridohobbies]

Absolutely, we do! Check out kzbin.info/door/zipicZiZ1843jAqmSGgYwg. People are working hard towards this.

[@MarkVolkmann]

@@astroid-ws4pyOr try Cuis Smalltalk

[@inmusiclove]

Yes yes yes! Glad i found this!

too much ahead of its time

[@LambOfDemyelination]

At 14:20 the fugue is part of Bach's Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor (BWV 582)

[@realmichaud]

Unbelievable they are showing midi display (notes) on the music. FM synthesis? Are we in an alternate reality? 1970s????

[@sleddy01]

Smalltalk is alive and well.

[@horridohobbies]

That's right. There are actually thousands of programmers around the world who use Smalltalk every day. There are thousands of enterprise customers at Cincom, Instantiations, and GemTalk Systems. There are hundreds more who use open source Pharo. Recently, they gathered to celebrate Smalltalk's 50th anniversary: kzbin.info/door/zipicZiZ1843jAqmSGgYwg.

[@brkr78]

Those guys were so far ahead of their time it isn't even funny anymore. It would take more then 10 years after this until GUIs began to gain traction. And it would be even longer - close to 30 years - for the idea of bytecode to find widespread utilization in things like the Java-VM or .NET. One can not overstate how incredible the guys in PARC were!

[@Santor-]

Yes, the under appreciation of the century. These guys got far too little credit.

[@jezbon]

It is mind-blowing stuff. But then again I think just the 1960s through to early 1990s was where most innovation really took place in computing. From Unix to JIT languages, UIs, TCP/IP, HTTP/idea of browsers (client/server model for it was basically "unix" as a concept in affect)... hell those early web days when forms were made... then "web forums". Today we see Facebook and people think that's innovation. Hell most multi-billion dollar IT software companies today don't innovate at all, it's old ideas with a new coat of paint... these guys...Smalltalk, Unix, Lisp, Xerox/Apple RE simplifying concepts of UI.... these were the geniuses no one since has really matched. Hell is SSL, cloud, bitcoin and blockchain actually innovation - really?

Okay, you did say "widespread"… but what does that mean, really? Was UCSD Pascal widespread? It was running on the Apple ][, which was "widespread". In the industry in general (which I'd say is one possible meaning of "widespread") bytecode systems are nothing new.

[@acasualviewer5861]

And we still haven't fully caught up

[@darkwinter6028]

If anybody has written a Mac or iOS app, you might notice that this seems kinda familiar... Objective C’s object oriented features were inspired by Smalltalk.

[@ruadeil_zabelin]

@Barry Manilowa Steve Jobs and some apple engineers sat down with the engineers from the Alto to get ideas for their Mac. In return Xerox would get Apple stock. Stole, not really... they made deals to be inspired.

[@ruadeil_zabelin]

Barry Manilowa that's just capitalism. Xerox didn't realize the potential of this system and didn't properly put it on the market. This will annoy good developers and they will go with the company that takes their work serious.

[@tomservo5007]

@@ruadeil_zabelin Objective C didn't start at Apple/NeXT

[@ruadeil_zabelin]

@@tomservo5007 I know. Next just made it popular, and when Steve Jobs came back to apple he brought all his objective c devs with him.

[@PixelOutlaw]

Only after C++ perverted the idea with scope paranoia and passed the cruft on to Java and C#. Opaque objects and message passing is the main take away from Smalltalk.

[@okb6436]

Dan is so wholesome

[@525Lines]

Love that tape drive with matching tape rack. It almost looks convenient.

[@TheUglyGnome]

You mean the one at 15:45? It's not tapes. They are disks.

[@joelpichette]

These were 3mb hard disks. You can find more in the Computer History Museum Channel on KZbin.

[@hotlaser]

Anybody knows what's the beautiful font he's using?

[@pauldourish]

It was a font designed specifically for the Smalltalk system, called Cream. There are images of prototype Mac and Lisa software using the same font.

[@hotlaser]

@@pauldourish Awesome, thank you for sharing this very special knowledge

[@pauldourish]

@@hotlaser You can see the font in some of these images: www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Busy_Being_Born.txt and www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Busy_Being_Born,_Part_2.txt

[@hotlaser]

@@pauldourish Thank you, this is is so lovely, I need to find that font!

[@aoeu256]

Hmm maybe on Linux or Chrome Smalltalk enviroment itself can be the GUI? I tried making a Python enviroment (look at my vids) back in the day.

[@horridohobbies]

SqueakJS runs in the browser.

[@nicknamenick9448]

It’s a pity that such computer costed so much in 1973

[@horridohobbies]

They were still quite expensive in 1990. Fortunately, today Smalltalk can run on the Raspberry Pi with pretty good performance.

[@anthonyover]

Sweet!

Bytecode… in octal, of course. :D

[@marekkarcz3946]

Amazing!

[@JOSECCB10]

But how great really is smalltalk? if really is as good as that then smaltalk will grow next years? or is it a death language?

[@foljs5858]

In the early 90s it was on a roll to supercede C++ and become dominant for regular software, with IBM support etc. But then Java came along, it was free (Smalltalk implementations costed money) and had tons of marketing, so businesses adopted Java and we went back 30+ years technology wise. Some of Smalltalk-driven technology ended up in Java (e.g. the fast Java JIT was made from the team that made Smalltalk JITs, and the same people went and did v8, the Chrome Javascript engine that's the most popular language now). Also the Smalltalk IDE became Eclipse for Java (the first very powerful Java IDE). Later the same guy lead the VSCode editor/IDE, now the most popular in the world.

[@PixelOutlaw]

You'll find that some of the best ideas in computing don't become standard. There are some very good languages like Smalltalk and Lisp that won't go mainstream because they don't have a billion dollar company pushing them through mobile devices. Yet they did things right and cleanly very early on.

[@astroid-ws4py]

You can experiment with Pharo if you would like a modern Smalltalk environment

[@horridohobbies]

To learn how great Smalltalk is/was, check out its 50th anniversary celebration: kzbin.info/door/zipicZiZ1843jAqmSGgYwg. Smalltalk is far from dead. There are actually thousands of programmers around the world who use Smalltalk every day. There are thousands of enterprise customers at Cincom, Instantiations, and GemTalk Systems. There are hundreds more who use open source Pharo.

[@smalltalkrenaissance]

"if really is as good as that then smalltalk will grow next years?" Possibly but it requires good PR and marketing. That's what Camp Smalltalk Supreme is all about: kzbin.info/door/zipicZiZ1843jAqmSGgYwg. Hopefully, this will do the trick.

[@sidework1]

I'll take this over Windows 10

[@spookyec]

amazing

[@intel386DX]

Xerox is very innovative company it should be the the personal computer king! Apple is peace of shit, they take ideas from xerox ! This machine is amazing!

[@InuXela]

You're ignorant. www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=On_Xerox,_Apple_and_Progress.txt&sortOrder=Sort+by+Date&characters=Jerry+Manock

[@litjellyfish]

InuXela finally a good real article that explains so people who can’t see the difference understand.

[@litjellyfish]

intel386DX Apple took inspiration as did Xerox. Both innovated and evolved concepts.

[@StealthGT40]

I disagree, Xerox engineers were happy that Apple recognized their work. Xerox was in the process of scrapping the Graphical user interface cause they had no vision. The engineers were happy that Steve Jobs came along and showed the world their creation plus Jobs hired most of the Alto team.

[@michelecampanelli5419]

👍👏❤ from 🇮🇹

[@Zakariah1971]

These fools could have been Apple Computer. Idiots! -Steve Jobs

[@lkedves]

Nope. _Creating_ something requires different attitude than _selling_ it (first the concept to investors and board members, then the product to people). PARC created the technology way ahead of time (if we forget about NLS but that's another story). Jobs practically bought up PARC from Xerox (so actually, these guys _are_ Apple Computer) was persistent and lucky enough to survive until Moore's law made it cheap enough for "classy" consumer products. Also, once Apple was saved by Microsoft, Jobs was fired from Apple, ... The bad side of history is that it does not fit into one sentence or a Tweet. 🙂

[@Ralphunreal]

@@lkedves no, xerox created it and it was sold but was too expensive.

[@custardtart1312]

“Gulp, gulp, swallow, gulp” Unbearable to listen to this man, the interesting topic lost in his saliva swallowing.