Pointless Nostalgia

Kevin Fisher kgf at golden.net
Sun Jan 27 18:58:17 UTC 2002


Hi Alan:

One thing I noticed about the interface on this tape is that whenever a window
opens, it sort of "spins" vertically into place...it's kind of hard
to describe...as a wireframe of the window appears and is resized, the
contents of the wireframe seem to oscillate vertically until the mouse 
was released.

Was this something the original Xerox machines did, or is it perhaps just
an artifact of recording a different refresh rate?  It was kind of a neat
effect!


On Sun, Jan 27, 2002 at 07:55:16AM -0800, Alan Kay wrote:
> Kevin --
> 
> It's hard to say what machine was being used, but the paint program 
> was the one that Bob Flegal did for the Smalltalk-80 release. 
> (Interestingly, there were previous painting programs in earlier 
> versions of Smalltalk (and in the prototype display) that were nicer 
> in many ways.) The one that Ted Kaehler did for Smalltalk-76 was 
> particularly nice with a very workable and friendly interface with 
> lots of features.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Alan
> 
> ---------
> 
> At 10:34 AM -0500 1/27/02, Kevin Fisher wrote:
> >Hi Folks:
> >
> >Here's a bit of pointless nostalgia...I found an ancient VHS tape that
> >had a computer show on it from early '82.  This particular show had a segment
> >about Smalltalk-80, including an interview with Adele Goldberg.
> >
> >I put some rather muddy screenshots of the system they were demoing up
> >on http://kgf.swiki.net/10
> >
> >I'm not sure what machine this is...they never said if it was an Alto or
> >something else.  I really like that paint program they were using, though!
> >
> >(My apologies about the muddy look of the screen grabs...this tape is
> >almost 2 decades old, recorded on a long dead "original" VHS machine..I'm
> >pretty sure if I rewound it all the way the tape would come loose from the
> >reel.)
> 
> 
> -- 
> 



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