Return key not working in GCC Win32 VM

Alan Kay Alan.Kay at disney.com
Fri Nov 3 02:41:37 UTC 2000


It would be a great story if true, but I certainly don't recall it. 
However, I am now such an old hat that there is very little left in 
it!

One that I do recall (and Dan will too) is that I did spend extended 
periods of time (many days) not using the keyboard at all in the 
version of Smalltalk-76 that had an excellent 
Ledeen/Sproull/Shoch/Kay character recognizer in it. That was a lot 
of fun, and gave a good sense of what a lot of the interaction on a 
future dynabook might be like.
      BTW, Nathanial Shaerli spent the summer with us and did an 
absolutely fantastic character recognizer that he also beautifully 
integrated within morphic, and which includes a terrific UI for 
understanding what the recognizer understands and for making changes, 
new integrations, etc.
      We plan to put this out when the current spate of big internal 
changes to Squeak settles down in a month or so, but he might be 
induced to send out his changeset earlier for those who are curious.

Cheers,

Alan

At 12:18 PM -0800 11/2/00, Dan Ingalls wrote:
>  >P.S.  I recall an old folklore tale, ever wondered if it was true: When
>>(IIRC) Alan's Alto keyboard was broken, it was sent off to repair for a
>>week, and he continued Smalltalking for the entire week by composing stuff
>>from existing bits.
>>
>>Can the old hats confirm/deny?
>
>I can't confirm/deny that particular one.
>
>However in the early days it often drew a gasp when we would pause 
>half way through a Smalltalk demo -- having already explored and 
>demonstrated numerous nitty-gritty programming facilities -- to 
>point out that we were, for the first time, about to use the 
>keyboard.
>
>Another keyboard story (also true) that you might paricularly 
>appreciate, relates a comment overheard from a corporate observer 
>after one of these demos (remember this is the early 1970's):
>
>	"I never thought a man could type that fast"
>
>And people wonder why technology transfer is hard.
>
>	- D





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