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Smalltalk Programming System

Smalltalk Programming System

Image creditBYTE magazine, August 1981 (cover art by Robert Tinney), scan via Internet Archive
unknown ↗

Smalltalk Programming System

Year
1972
Creator
Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Adele Goldberg, Ted Kaehler and the PARC Learning Research Group
Company
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)
Location
Palo Alto, California

Description

Smalltalk is an object-oriented programming language and graphical environment that the Learning Research Group at Xerox PARC developed during the 1970s. The image is the cover of the August 1981 BYTE magazine, which gave a full issue to Smalltalk-80.

Importance

The Smalltalk group at PARC invented overlapping windows in the early 1970s. Steve Jobs and other Apple staff saw a Smalltalk demonstration at PARC in 1979, after Apple had started its Lisa project. The 1981 BYTE issue introduced many programmers to object-oriented programming.

Interesting fact

During the 1979 Apple demonstration, Dan Ingalls changed the scrolling code in less than a minute while the system continued to run.

Sources

  1. The Early History of Smalltalk (Alan Kay, ACM HOPL-II) ↗ACM / worrydream.com reprint · 1993
  2. Adele Goldberg, 2014 Computer History Museum Fellow ↗Computer History Museum
  3. BYTE, Volume 6, Number 8: Smalltalk (August 1981) ↗Internet Archive · 1981-08