Kevin --

That was one of a number of designs done in the first couple of years 
at PARC. There were several that were called "Simulation LOGO" (or 
SLOGO, as I had a feeling they would start off being nice and slow). 
Then there were several called Smalltalk (but now called 
Smalltalk-71), then Smalltalk-72 happened in Sept 72.
      The example in the actual Rolling Stones article (published in 
Nov 72) looks to me like one of the SLOGO versions. All of these 
languages had different devices that unified functions and classes -- 
I see that the one used here was that "create" in front of a function 
call would create an instance. In Smalltalk-72, this determination 
was made via a side-effect of an internal test in the body of the 
class.

Spacewar was one of about 20 "quintessential examples" for me during 
that time that had to be small, pretty, understandable, readable, and 
programmable by "regular people", especially kids -- so it got 
rewritten many times. (The current etoys system in Squeak allows a 
very pretty and compact version to be easily made.)

This article by Stewart Brand might just be the best writing anyone 
has done on this culture. It's not mentioned here, but the Whole 
Earth Truck Store was right across the street from SRI (Doug 
Engelbart and the SRI AI group, both ARPA projects) while all this 
was going on. Most of the ARPA computerists were part of the counter 
culture and the "Free University" which stretched from University 
Avenue in Palo Alto up into Menlo Park. The Whole Earth Catalog and 
what it stood for was used as a beacon for "what computers should 
turn into for people", and Stewart got to see it all (among other 
things, he was one of the cameramen in the famous Engelbart show in 
San Francisco in 1968).

Re: the ARPANET. There is very little that has happened so far with 
the Internet that wasn't part of the conversation about the ARPANET 
in the early sixties, years before it was designed, built, and first 
turned on in Sept 1969. And many important things that were done in 
the late sixties by Engelbart and others have been done worse or not 
at all so far by the larger culture that is bumbling around with the 
Internet. Point of view is indeed worth 80 IQ points!

Re: beanbag chairs. Just get some and use them. They are not part of 
any culture that requires "convincing employers".

Cheers,

Alan

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At 11:07 AM -0500 11/23/00, Kevin Fisher wrote:
>Recently I was reading that old Rolling Stone article about Spacewar
>(http://www.wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html) and lamenting
>that I was born too late. :) I was just wondering...at the end of the
>article are some code snippets attributed to Alan Kay.  It looks
>Smalltalk-ish...what dialect of Smalltalk is that? :) And how can
>I convince my employer to build a beanbag-chair room like the one
>in the picture?
>
>(I really enjoyed reading this article...what fabulous snapshot of a
>very exciting time to be involved with computers...the ARPAnet was only
>2 years old at the time of writing, and already they were talking about
>internet games, and music sharing a-la Napster!)