The History of Computing

The Tetris Negotiations Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us for the innovations of the future! Todays episode is on the origins of Tetris. I’ll never forget the first time I saw St. Basil’s as I was loading Tetris up. I’ll never get those hours back that I played it. Countless hours. So how did it all begin? OK, so check this out. It’s 1984. Los Angeles hosts the olympics and the Russians refuse to come. But then, the US had refused to come to Moscow when they had the Olympics. I am fairly certain that someone stuck their tongue out at someone else. It happens a lot in preschool. One may have even given the middle finger. That’s what middle school is named after, right? It was a recession. Microchips were getting cheap. And Digital Equipment Corporation’s PDP was one of the best computers ever made. It wasn’t exactly easy to come by in Russia though. The microcomputer was becoming a thing. And Alexey Pajitnov was working at the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. As with a lot of R&D places, they were experimenting with new computers. The Electronika 60 was so similar to the PDP that DEC chip designers printed jokes on chips just for Russians looking to steal their chip designs. They actually managed to get a quarter million ops per second 5 VLSI chips with 8k of RAM. They needed to do some random number generation and visualization. Good ole’ Alexey was told to write some software to test the Electronika. He thought, ya’ know, I should do a game. The beauty of writing games is that they can be math intensive, so perfect for benchmarking. But what kind of game? When he was a kid, he’d loved to play pentomino games. That’s a game where there are 5 squares connected in one of 12 ways. Reduce that to 4 and it’s 7. The thing is, when you have 5 the math was a little too intense. And it was a little easier with 4 blocks. He drew them on the screen in ascii and had the tetraminos fall down the screen. The games ended pretty quick, so he added an additional feature that deleted rows once they were complete. Then, he sped the falling speed up as you cleared a level. You had to spin your puzzle pieces faster, the further you got. And once you’re addicted, you turn and turn and turn and turn. No frills, just fun. It needed a name though. Since you’re spinning 4 blocks or Greet for tetras, it seemed like it got mashed up with tennis for tetraminiss. No, tetraminoss. Wait, cut a syllable here and there and you get to Tetris. They have 7 shapes, ijlostz. The IBM PC version ran with the I as maroon, the j as silver, the l as purple, the o as navy, the green is s, the brown is t, the teal is z. He got a little help from help of Dmitry Pavlovsky and 16 year old programming whiz, Vadim Gerasimov. Probably because they were already hopelessly addicted to the game. They ported it to the fancy schmancy IBM PC in about two months, and it started to spread around Moscow. By now, his coworkers are freakin’ hooked. This was the era of disk sharing. And disks were certainly being shared. But it didn’t stop there. It leaked out all over the place, making its way to Budapest, where it ended up on a machine at British-based game maker Andromeda. CEO Robert Stein sends a Telex to Dmitry Pavlovsky. He offers 75% royalties on sales and $10,000. Pretty standard stuff so far, but this is where it gets fun. So Pavlovsky responds that they should maybe negotiate a contract. But Andromeda had already sold the rights to spectrum holobyte and so attempted to license the software from the Hungarian developers that did the porting. Then realized that was dumb and went back to the negotiating table, getting it done for “computers.” All license deals went through the USSR at the time, and the Russian government was happy to take over the contract negotiations. So the USSR's Ministry of Software and Hardware Export gets involved. Through a company they setup for this called Elektronorgtechnica or ELORG, they negotiated the contract and did. That’s how by 87 Tetris spreads to the US. In fact, Tetris was the first game released from ussr to USA and was for Commodore 64 and IBM PC. It was so simple it was sold as a budget title. Apple II package came with three versions on three disks, 5.25 inch, not copy protected yet. Can you say honor system. In 1988, Henk Rogers discovers Tetris at a trade show in Vegas and gets all kinds of hooked. Game consoles had been around for a long time, and anyone who paid attention knew that a number of organizations around the world were looking to release handhelds. Now, Old Henk was the Dutch video game designer behind a role playing game called The Black Onyx and had been looking for his next thing and customers. When he saw Tetris, he knew it was something special. He also knew the Game Boy was coming and thought maybe this was the killer game for the platform. He did his research and contacted Stein from Andromeda to get the rights to make a version for mobiles. Stein was into it but wasn’t on the best of terms with the Russian government because he was a little late in his royalty payments. Months went by. Henk didn’t hear back. Spectrum HoloByte got wind as well and sent Kevin Maxwell to Moscow to get the rights. Realizing his cash cow was getting in danger, old Stein from Andromeda also decided to hop on a plane and go to Moscow. They each met with the Russians separately in about a three day span. Henk Rogers is a good dude. As a developer who’d been dealing with rights to his own game, he decided the best way to handle the Russians was to actually just lay out how it all worked. He gave them a crash course in the evolving world of computer vs mobile license agreements in an international world. The Russians showed him their contracts with Andromeda. He told them how it should all really be. They realized Andromeda wasn’t giving them the best of deals. Henk also showed them a game that there’s no rights deal for. Whether all this was intentionally screwing the other parties or not is for history, but by the time he walked out he’d make a buck per copy that went on the Gameboy. There was other wrangling with the other two parties including an incident where the Russians sent a fax they knew Maxwell couldn’t get in order to get out of a clause in a contract. This all set up a few law suits and resulted in certain versions in certain countries shipping then being pulled back off the shelf. Fun times. But because of it all, in 1989 the Game Boy was released. Henk was right, Tetris turned out to be the killer app for the platform. Until Minecraft came along it was the most popular game of all time, selling over 30 million copies. And ranked #5 in the 100 best Nintendo games. It was the first Game Boy game that came with the ability to link up to other Game Boys and you could play against your friends. Back then you needed to use a cable to coop. The field was 10 wide and 18 high in game boy and it was set to music from Nintendo composer Hirokazu Tanaka. The Berlin Wall is torn down in 1989. I suspect that was part of the negotiations with Game Boy. Can you imagine Gorbetrev and Reagan with their Game Boys linked up playing Tetris for hours over the fate of Germany? ‘Cause I can. You probably think there were much more complicated negotiations taking place. I do not. I tend to think Reagan’s excellent Tetris skills ended the Cold War. So Pajitnov’s friend Vladimir Pokhilko had done some work on the game as well and in 1989. He ran psychological experiments using the game and with that research, the two would found a company called AnimaTek. They would focus on 3D software, releasing El-fish through Maxis. While Tetris had become the most successful game of all time, Pokhilko was in a dire financial crisis and would commit suicide. There’s more to that story but it’s pretty yuck so we’ll leave it at that. Pajitnov, the original developer, finally got royalties in 1996 when the Parastroika agreement ended. Because Henk Rogers had been a good dude, they formed The Tetris Company together to manage licensing of the game. Pajitnov went to work at Microsoft in 1996, working on games. The story has become much more standard since then. Although in 2012 the US Court on International Trade responded to some requests to shut competitors down noting that the US Copyright didn’t apply to rules of game and so Tetris did file other patents and trademarks to limit how close competitors could get to the original game mechanics. After studying at the MIT Media Lab, that 16 year old programmer, Vadim Gerasimov went to become an engineer at Google. Henk Rogers serves as the Managing Director of The Tetris Company. Since designing Tetris, Pajitnov has made a couple dozen other games, with Marbly on iOS being the latest success. It needs a boss button. Tetris has been released on arcade games, home consoles, mobile devices, pdas, music players, computers, Oscilloscope Easter eggs and I’m pretty sure it now has its own planet or 4. It probably owes some of its success to the fact that it makes people smarter. Dr Richard hayer claims Tetris leads to more efficient brain activity. Boosts general cognitive abilities. Improved cerebral cortex thickness. If my cortex were thicker I’d probably research effects of games as a means of justifying the countless hours I wanted to spend on them too. So that’s the story of Tetris. It ended the Cold War, makes you smarter, and now Alexy gets a cut of every cent you spend on it. So he’ll likely thank you for your purchase. Just as I thank you for tuning in to another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We’re so very lucky to have you. Have a great day! Now back to my game!

Apple Lore: The Pinks Versus The Blue Meanies Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us for the innovations of the future! Today we’re going to cover two engineering groups at Apple: The Pinks and the Blue Meanies. The Mac OS System 6 had been the sixth operating system released in five years. By 1988, Apple was keeping up an unrealistic release cadence, especially given that the operating system had come along at an interesting time when a lot of transitions were happening in IT, and there were lot of increasingly complex problems trying to code around earlier learning opportunities. After sweeping the joint for bugs, Apple held an offsite engineering meeting in Pescadero and split the ideas for the next operating system into two colors of cards: pink, red, green, and blue. The most important of these for this episode were pink, or future release stuff and blue, or next release, stuff. The notecards were blue. The architects of blue were horrible, arrogant self-proclaimed bastards. They’d all seen Yellow Submarine and so they went with the evil Pepperland Blue Meanies. As architects, they were the ones who often said no to things. The Blue Meanies ended up writing much of the core of System 7. They called this OS, which took 3 years to complete, The Big Bang. It would last on the market for 6 years. Longer than any operating system from Apple did prior or since. System 7 gave us CDs, File Sharing, began the migration to a 32-bit OS, replaced MacroMaker with AppleScript and Apple Events and the Extensions Manager, which we’re likely to see a return of given the pace Apple’s going these days. System 7.0.1 came with an Easter egg. If you typed in Help! Help! We're being held prisoner in a system software factory! You got a list of names: Darin Adler Scott Boyd Chris Derossi Cynthia Jasper Brian McGhie Greg Marriott Beatrice Sochor Dean Yu The later iterations of the file ended “Who dares wins” Pink was meant to get more than incremental gains. They wanted coorperative multitasking. The people who really pushed for this were senior engineers Bayles Holt, David Goldsmith, Gene Pope, Erich Ringewald, and Gerard Schutten, referred to as the Gang of Five. They had their pink cards and knew that what was on them was critical, or Apple might have to go out and buy some other company to get the next really operating system. They insisted that they be given the time to build this new operating system and traded their managers to the blue meanies for the chance to build the preemptive multitasking and a more component-based, or object-oriented applications esgn. They got Mike Potel as their manager. They worked in a separate location looking to launch their new operating system in two years. The code named as Defiant, given that Pink just wasn’t awesome. They shared space with the Newton geeks. Given that they had two years and they saw the technical debt in System 6 as considerable, they had to decide if they were going to build a new OS from the ground up, or build on top of the System 6. They pulled in the Advanced Technology Group, another team at Apple, and got up to 11 people. They ended up starting over with a new microkernel they called Opus. Big words. The Pink staff ended up pulling in ideas from other cards and got up to about 25 people. From there, it went a little off the rail and turf wars set in. It kept growing. 100 engineers. They were secretive. They eventually grew to 150 people by 1990. Remember, two years. And the further out they got the less likely that the code would ever be backwards compatible. The Pink GUI used isometric icons, rounded windows, drop shadows, beveling, was fully internationalized, and were huge influences in Mac OS 8 and Copland. Even IBM was impressed by the work being done on Pink and in 1991 they entered an alliance with Apple to help take on what was quickly becoming a Microsoft Monopoly. They planned to bring this new OS to the market as a new company called Taligent in the mid-90s. Just two more years. In 1992, Taligent moved out of Apple with 170 employees, and Joe Guglielmi, who had once led the OS/2 team and had been a marketing exec at IBM for 30 years. By then, this one one of 5 partnerships between Apple and IBM, something that starts and stops every now and then up to today. It was an era of turf wars and empire building. But it was the era of Object orientation. Since Smalltalk, this had been a key aspect in higher level languages such as Java and in the AS/400. IBM had already done it with OS/2 and AIX. By 1993 there was suspicion. Again they grow, now to over 250 people, but they really just needed two more years, guys. Apple actually released an object-oriented SDK called Bedrock to migrate from System 7 to Pink, which could work also work with Windows 3.1, NT, and OS/2. Before you know it they were building a development environment on AIX and porting frameworks to HP-UX, OS/2, Windows. By 1994 the apps could finally run on an IBM RS/6000 running AIX. The buzz continued. Ish. 1994 saw HP take on 15% of the company and add Smalltalk into the mix. HP brought new compilers into the portfolio, and needed native functionality. The development environment was renamed to cq professional and the User Interface builder was changed to cqconstructor. TalAE became CommonPoint. TalOS was scheduled to ship in 1996. Just two more years. The world wanted to switch away from monolithic apps and definitely away from procedural apps. It still does. Every attempt to do so just takes two more years. Then and now. That’s what we call “Enterprise Software” and as with anyone who’s ok with such pace, Joe Guglielmi left Taligent in 1995. Let’s review where we are. There’s no real shipping OS. There’s an IDE but C++ programmers would need 3 months training to get up to speed on Taligent. Most needed a week or two class to learn Java, if that. Steve Jobs had aligned with Sun in OpenStep. So Apple was getting closer and closer to IBM. But System 7 was too big a dog to run Taligent. Debbie Coutant became CEO towards the end of the year. HP and Apple sold their stake in the company which was then up to 375 employees. Over half were laid off and the organization was wrapped into IBM as would be focusing on… Java. Commonpoint would be distributed across IBM products where possible. Taligent themselves would be key to the Java work done at IBM. By then IBM was a services first organization anyways, so it kinda’ all makes sense. TalOS was demoed in 1996 but never released. It was unique. It was object oriented from the ground up. It was an inspiration of a new era of interfaces. It was special. But it never shipped. Mac OS 8 was released in 1997. Better late than never. But it was clear that there was no more runway left in the code that had been getting bigger and meaner. They needed a strategy. The final Taligent employees got sucked into IBM that year, ending a fascinating drama in operating systems and frameworks. Whatever the behind baseball story, Apple decided to bring Steve Jobs back in, in 1997. And he brought NeXT, which gave the Mac all the object-oriented neediness they wanted. They got Objective-C, Mach (through Avie Tevanian of Carnegie Mellon), Property Lists, AppWrappers (.app), Workspace Manager (which begat the Finder), The Dock, and NetInfo. And they finally retired the Apple Bonkers server. But as importantly as anything else, they got Bertrand Serlet and Craig Federighi - who as the next major VPs of Software were able to keep the ship in the right direction and by 2001 they gave us 10.0: Cheetah * Darwin (kinda’ like Unix) with Terminal * Mail, Address Book, iTunes * AppleScript survived, AppleTalk didn’t * Aqua UI, Carbon and Cocoa APIs * AFP over TCP/IP, HTTP, SSH, and FTP server/client * Native PDF Support It began a nearly 20 year journey that we are still on. So in the end, the Pinks never shipped an operating system, despite their best intentions. And the Blues never paid down their technical debt. Despite their best intentions. As engineers, we need a plan. We need to ship incrementally. We need good, sane cultures that can work together. We need to pay down technical debt - but we don’t need to run amuck building technology that’s a little ahead of our time. Even if it’s always just two more years ahead of our time. And I think we’re at time gentle listeners. And I hope it doesn’t take me two years to ship this, gentle listeners. But if it does or doesn’t, thanks for tuning into another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We’re lucky to have you. Have a great day!

The Blue Meanies Origin Joke Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us for the innovations of the future! Today we’re going to look at an alternative story of how the Blue Meanies formed, from Greg Marriott, a Blue Meanie: https://web.archive.org/web/19991013005722/http://spies.com/greg/bluemeanies.html How Did The Blue Meanies Come To Be? The "Blue Meanies" was the name of a group of generalists in the system software group at Apple. I was a member of the group for three and half years. We were experts at Mac programming and debugging, and we guided the architecture of Mac system software for several years. People often ask how the Blue Meanies got started. The truth was pretty mundane, so I made up this story a few years ago. By the way, we had a hamster mascot named Gibbly. The stooped figure in the bloodstained lab coat scurried around the lab, checking his instruments. All was in readiness. Tonight, finally, he would silence the skeptics. He would show them his theories weren't those of a crack-pot, but those of a genius! He turned and surveyed the eleven tiny figures strapped on the tables in the center of the cavernous laboratory. The frightened rodents twisted and squirmed, but could not break free. Their sharp teeth had no effect on the stainless steel straps holding them in place. A twelfth hamster in a cage, marked with a nameplate that said "Gibbly," watched in horror as her brothers and sisters were subjected to this unthinkable torture. Their wide frightened eyes beheld their tormentor as he performed some last minute adjustments on the huge panel filling the far wall of the lab. Had they any intelligence at all they would have recognized the eleven identical sets of medical monitors. Gauges, meters, and dials reflected respiration, heart rate, and blood pressure. Eleven long streamers of paper inched their way out of the EEGs, leaving twisted little piles on the floor. The mad scientist paused and remembered the laughter of his peers when he presented his ideas to them. His face hardened as he recalled their ridicule when he proposed his "Theory of Transfiguration." His carefully documented research clearly showed that one mammal could be turned into another, yet they jeered and hooted until he was forced off stage, humiliated. He decided then to continue with his plan to prove his theories by turning rodents into monkeys. The old man smiled grimly and faced his subjects. He crossed the room and sat before his Macintosh. The desk was covered with documentation, leaving barely enough room to move the mouse. He shoved TechNotes and volumes of Inside Macintosh out of the way to make more room. He briefly checked that his control program was ready, reaching for the mouse. A couple of clicks later, relays closed deep inside the complex machines and the process began. Right at that moment, lightning struck the power lines just outside the lab windows. The Mac exploded in a shower of sparks. The blast propelled the old man backwards, his wheeled chair racing across the lab floor. He crashed into the panels and slid out of the chair onto the shiny floor. The piles of loose paper and manuals vaporized filling the air with a fine mist. At the same time enormous amounts of power surged through the machines, the tables, and the poor helpless hamsters. Automatic safety devices failed, fused by the jolt of electricity. The transformation raced out of control. The straps holding the hamsters snapped open, but the stunned animals still could not move. A puslating aura surrounded them, permeated their tiny bodies, growing stronger and stronger. As the acrid smoke from the Mac and the remnants of the manuals swirled through the aura it began to shimmer violently. The transformation continued. The eleven rodents began to shudder uncontrollably as the immense energy surrounding them intensified further. Had the scientist been conscious, he would have noted their change in size and form. They grew longer and wider and their fur (mostly) disappeared, replaced by Reeboks, Levis and t-shirts. Critical components in the complicated machinery finally succumbed to the outrageous current. Sparks flew from the panels and tiny lights winked out as the transformation process ground to a halt. The aura subsided and suddenly the air was very still. The old man stirred and groaned as his abused bones protested their treatment. He shook his head to clear it and was immediately forced to wonder why anyone would do such a thing after being slammed into a wall. He rose and looked at the stainless steel tables, expecting to see years of research blown to bits. He gasped in astonishment at the scene his eyes beheld. Eleven pairs of human eyes looked back at him. Unfortunately, the shock of such an overwhelming success was too much for him. His aging heart stopped beating and he fell heavily to the floor. Equally unfortunate was the intense paranoia which caused him to encrypt all of his notes. The eleven Blue Meanies [the way they got their name is another story... -ed.] looked at each other and smiled. The knowledge fused into their very structure by the aura made them giddy with excitement. They desperately wanted to use this newfound information in some way but didn't quite know what to do. They milled around the lab in confusion, looking for some clue that would tell them what to do next. One of them noticed a charred scrap of paper on the floor and picked it up. He showed it to the others, and soon they decided what to do. They grabbed Gibbly and filed out of the lab, not looking back, and set out on a long journey to Apple Computer, Inc., 20525 Mariani Ave, Cupertino, CA 95014.

Mavis Beacon Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us for the innovations of the future! Today we’re going to give thanks to a wonderful lady. A saint. The woman that taught me to type. Mavis Beacon. Over the years I often wondered what Mavis was like. She took me from a kid that was filled with wonder about these weird computers we had floating around school to someone that could type over a hundred words a minute. She always smiled. I never saw her frown once. I thought she must be a teacher somewhere. She must be a kind lady whose only goal in the world was to teach young people how to type. And indeed, she’s taught over a million people to type in her days as a teacher. In fact she’d been teaching for years by the time I first encountered her. Mavis Beacon was initially written for MS-DOS in 1987 and released by The Software Toolworks. Norm Worthington, Mike Duffy joined Walt Bilofsky started the company out of Sherman Oaks, California in 1980 and also made Chessmaster in 1986. They started with HDOS, a health app for the Osborne 1. They worked on Small C and Grogramma, releasing a conversation simulation tool from Joseph Weizenbaum in 1981. They wrote Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing in 1987 for IBM PCs. It took "Three guys, three computers, three beds, in four months”. It was an instant success. They went public in 1988 and were acquired by Pearson in 1994 for around half a billion dollars, becoming Mindscape in 1994. By 1998 she’d taught over 6,000,000 kids to type. Today, Encore Software produces the software and Software MacKiev distributes a version for the Mac. The software integrates with iTunes, supports competitive typing games, and still tracks words-per-minute. But who was Mavis? What inspired her to teach generations of children to type? Why hasn’t she aged? Mavis was named after Mavis Staples but she was a beacon to anyone looking to learn to type, thus Mavis Beacon. Mavis was initially portrayed by Haitian-born Renée L'Espérance, who was discovered working behind the perfume counter at Saks Fifth Avenue Beverly Hills by talk-show host Les Crane in 1985. He then brought her in to be the model. Featuring an African-American woman regrettably caused some marketing problems but didn’t impact the success of the release. So until the next episode, think about this: Mavis Beacon, real or not, taught me and probably another 10 million kids to type. She opened the door for us to do more with computers. I could never write code or books or even these episodes at a rate if it hadn’t been for her. So I owe her my sincerest of gratitude. And Norm Worthington, for having the idea in the first place. And I owe you my gratitude, for tuning into another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We’re lucky to have you. Have a great day!

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us for the innovations of the future! Today we’re going to cover the first real object-oriented programming language, Smalltalk. Many people outside of the IT industry would probably know the terms Java, Ruby, or Swift. But I don’t think I’ve encountered anyone outside of IT that has heard of Smalltalk in a long time. And yet… Smalltalk influenced most languages in use today and even a lot of the base technologies people would readily identify with. As with PASCAL from Episode 3 of the podcast, Smalltalk was designed and created in part for educational use, but more so for constructionist learning for kids. Smalltalk was first designed at the Learning Research Group (LRG) of Xerox PARC by Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Adele Goldberg, Ted Kaehler, Scott Wallace, and others during the 1970s. Alan Kay had coined the term object-oriented programming was coined by Alan Kay in the late 60s. Kay took the lead on a project which developed an early mobile device called the Dynabook at Xerox PARC, as well as the Smalltalk object-oriented programming language. The first release was called Smalltalk-72 and was really the first real implementation of this weird new programming philosophy Kay had called object-oriented programming. Although… Smalltalk was inspired by Simula 67, from Norwegian developers Kirsten Nygaard and Ole-johan Dahl. Even before that Stewart Nelson and others from MIT had been using a somewhat object oriented model when working on Lisp and other programs. Kay had heard of Simula and how it handled passing messages and wrote the initial Smalltalk in a few mornings. He’d go on work with Dan Ingalls to help with implementation and Adele Goldberg to write documentation. This was Smalltalk 71. Object oriented program is a programming language model where programs are organized around data, also called objects. This is a contrast to programs being structured around functions and logic. Those objects could be data fields, attributes, behaviors, etc. For example, a product you’re selling can have a sku, a price, dimensions, quantities, etc. This means you figure out what objects need to be manipulated and how those objects interact with one another. Objects are generalized as a class of objects. These classes define the kind of data and the logic used when manipulating data. Within those classes, there are methods, which define the logic and interfaces for object communication, known as messages. As programs grow and people collaborate on them together, an object-oriented approach allows projects to more easily be divided up into various team members to work on different parts. Parts of the code are more reusable. The way programs are played out is more efficient. And in turn, the code is more scalable. Object-oriented programming is based on a few basic principals. These days those are interpreted as encapsulation, abstraction, inheritance, and polymorphism. Although to Kay encapsulation and messaging are the most important aspects and all the classing and subclassing isn’t nearly as necessary. Most modern languages that matter are based on these same philosophies, such as java, javascript, Python, C++, .Net, Ruby. Go, Swift, etc. Although Go is arguably not really object-oriented because there’s no type hierarchy and some other differences, but when I look at the code it looks object-oriented! So there was this new programming paradigm emerging and Alan Kay really let it shine in Smalltalk. At the time, Xerox PARC was in the midst of revolutionizing technology. The MIT hacker ethic had seeped out to the west coast with Marvin Minsky’s AI lab SAIL at Stanford and got all mixed into the fabric of chip makers in the area, such as Fairchild. That Stanford connection is important. The Augmentation Research Center is where Engelbart introduced the NLS computer and invented the Mouse there. And that work resulted in advances like hypertext links. In the 60s. Many of those Stanford Research Institute people left for Xerox PARC. Ivan Sutherland’s work on Sketchpad was known to the group, as was the mouse from NLS, and because the computing community that was into research was still somewhat small, most were also aware of the graphic input language, or GRAIL, that had come out of Rand. Sketchpad's had handled each drawing elements as an object, making it a predecessor to object-oriented programming. GRAIL ran on the Rand Tablet and could recognize letters, boxes, and lines as objects. Smalltalk was meant to show a dynamic book. Kinda’ like the epub format that iBooks uses today. The use of similar objects to those used in Sketchpad and GRAIL just made sense. One evolution led to another and another, from Lisp and the batch methods that came before it through to modern models. But the Smalltalk stop on that model railroad was important. Kay and the team gave us some critical ideas. Things like overlapping windows. These were made possibly by the inheritance model of executions, a standard class library, and a code browser and editor. This was one of the first development environments that looked like a modern version of something we might use today, like an IntelliJ or an Eclipse for Java developers. Smalltalk was the first implementation of the Model View Controller in 1979, a pattern that is now standard for designing graphical software interfaces. MVC divides program logic into the Model, the View, and the Controller in order to separate internal how data is represented from how it is presented as decouples the model from the view and the controller allow for much better reuse of libraries of code as well as much more collaborative development. Another important thing happened at Xerox in 1979, as they were preparing to give Smalltalk to the masses. There are a number of different interpretations to stories about Steve Jobs and Xerox PARC. But in 1979, Jobs was looking at how Apple would evolve. Andy Hertzfeld and the original Mac team were mostly there at Apple already but Jobs wanted fresh ideas and traded a million bucks in Apple stock options to Xerox for a tour of PARC. The Lisa team came with him and got to see the Alto. The Alto prototype was part of the inspiration for a GUI-based Lisa and Mac, which of course inspired Windows and many advances since. Smalltalk was finally released to other vendors and institutions in 1980, including DEC, HP, Apple, and Berkely. From there a lot of variants have shown up. Instantiations partnered with IBM and in 1984 had the first commercial version at Tektronix. A few companies tried to take SmallTalk to the masses but by the late 80s SQL connectivity was starting to add SQL support. The Smalltalk companies often had names with object or visual in the name. This is a great leading indicator of what Smalltalk is all about. It’s visual and it’s object oriented. Those companies slowly merged into one another and went out of business through the 90s. Instantiations was acquired by Digitalk. ParcPlace owed it’s name to where the language was created. The biggest survivor was ObjectShare, who was traded on NASDAQ, peaking at $24 a share until 1999. In a LA Times article: “ObjectShare Inc. said its stock has been delisted from the Nasdaq national market for failing to meet listing requirements. In a press release Thursday, the company said it is appealing the decision.” And while the language is still maintained by companies like Instantiations, in the heyday, there was even a version from IBM called IBM VisualAge Smalltalk. And of course there were combo-language abominations, like a smalltalk java add on. Just trying to breathe some life in. This was the era where Filemaker, Foxpro, and Microsoft Access were giving developers the ability to quickly build graphical tools for managing data that were the next generation past what Smalltalk provided. And on the larger side products like JDS, Oracle, Peoplesoft, really jumped to prominence. And on the education side, the industry segmented into learning management systems and various application vendors. Until iOS and Google when apps for those platforms became all the rage. Smalltalk does live on in other forms though. As with many dying technologies, an open source version of Smalltalk came along in 1996. Squeak was written by Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Ted Kaehler, Scott Wallace, John Maloney, Andreas Raab, Mike Rueger and continues today. I’ve tinkerated with Squeak here and there and I have to say that my favorite part is just getting to see how people who actually truly care about teaching languages to kids. And how some have been doing that for 40 years. A great quote from Alan Kay, discussing a parallel between Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” and the advances they made to build the Dynabook: If somebody just sat down and implemented what Bush had wanted in 1945, and didn't try and add any extra features, we would like it today. I think the same thing is true about what we wanted for the Dynabook. There’s a direct path with some of the developers of Smalltalk to deploying MacBooks and Chromebooks in classrooms. And the influences these more mass marketed devices have will be felt for generations to come. Even as we devolve to new models from object-oriented programming, and new languages. The research that went into these early advances and the continued adoption and research have created a new world of teaching. At first we just wanted to teach logic and fundamental building blocks. Now kids are writing code. This might be writing java programs in robotics classes, html in Google Classrooms, or beginning iOS apps in Swift Playgrounds. So until the next episode, think about this: Vannevar Bush pushed for computers to help us think, and we have all of the worlds data at our fingertips. With all of the people coming out of school that know how to write code today, with the accelerometers, with the robotics skills, what is the next stage of synthesizing all human knowledge and truly making computers help with As we may think. So thank you so very much for tuning into another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We’re lucky to have you. Have a great day!