Dan Ingalls graciously granted me a 90-minute interview for my FLOSS "Weekly" show. We talked about the early days at Xerox PARC, the birth of Squeak, and the Lively Kernel. Hear the interview at http://twit.tv/floss29.
Thanks Dan!
I just went through that interview and it is really something. A must listen for every Squeaker to refresh the history of Squeak, the Smalltalk but also the history of modern computing, because that's all started within groups Dan Ingalls worked with and contributed the hardest part. Again, a must listen!
Janko
Randal L. Schwartz wrote:
Dan Ingalls graciously granted me a 90-minute interview for my FLOSS "Weekly" show. We talked about the early days at Xerox PARC, the birth of Squeak, and the Lively Kernel. Hear the interview at http://twit.tv/floss29.
Thanks Dan!
Definitely. Most of the stories people will know (didn't know about the "Ha Ha" part, though), but it's great to hear and learn new things. Especially about E, caja and Lively Kernel. BTW, I'm doing an embedded system right now and might be running gumstix for prototyping. Didn't Jon Hylands use a gumstix with his MicroSeeker? I see from his site that he's using an axis now. I then revisited Dan's weather station site (the swiki has an incorrect link which I fixed so go read about it at: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/3502)
A must listen, if you want not only to learn (or to recall, for some of us), but also there is a lot of fun brought by Randal tm :)
Let the 'serious' programmers write their multimillionaire lines of half-working code in C, and let people like Dan, write a systems like Lively Kernel just for fun of it! We need to understand, that Programming HAS TO BE FUN, it should not be a slave labor. Because history shows us that slave labor is most ineffective way in doing anything and that's one of the reasons why great empires fall. People just like to have fun!
On Fri, 23 May 2008 11:55:03 -0700, "Brad Fuller" bradallenfuller@gmail.com wrote:
BTW, I'm doing an embedded system right now and might be running gumstix for prototyping. Didn't Jon Hylands use a gumstix with his MicroSeeker? I see from his site that he's using an axis now.
I use a gumstix with a few of my robots, although as yet MicroSeeker hasn't run with a gumstix inside.
http://www.huv.com/roboMagellan - started out life with my Axim, but that got fried, so I switched to using a gumstix (running Squeak).
http://www.bioloid.info/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=BrainEngineering+BrainBot Uses a gumstix onboard, running Squeak, to handle redirection to the Bioloid bus from a wifi socket.
MicroRaptor (http://www.huv.com/blog) uses a Hammer, which is another ARM9-based SBC running Squeak.
Later, Jon
-------------------------------------------------------------- Jon Hylands Jon@huv.com http://www.huv.com/jon
Project: Micro Raptor (Small Biped Velociraptor Robot) http://www.huv.com/blog
Fun interview!
At one point, Leo laments an absence of literary coverage of PARC's 1979 demo for Apple and its ramifications. It's out there. One interesting source is "Fire in the Valley, the Making of the Personal Computer"[1] by Paul Freiberger (another ex-Intervalite) and Michael Swaine, which was also the basis for the hilarious film "Pirates of Silicon Valley"[2]. There's even a scene featuring that demo, complete with an indignant rendering of Adele. :) And there's also the documentary "Triumph of the Nerds"[3], featuring appearances from many of the actual people.
Another source is the classic (infamous?) "Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer"[4], by Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander, which Leo even attempts to mention (he can't quite remember the title).
And there's always folklore.org, which recounts many interesting Apple anecdotes from back in the day.
thanks again!
-C
[1] http://www.fireinthevalley.com [2] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168122 [3] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115398 [4] http://tinyurl.com/64fv2u (amazon.com)
-- Craig Latta improvisational musical informaticist www.netjam.org Smalltalkers do: [:it | All with: Class, (And love: it)]
On Sat, May 24, 2008 at 8:28 PM, Craig Latta craig@netjam.org wrote: Another title is "Dealers of Lightning: XEROX PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age" by Michael Hiltzik. It's even published as a very entertaining audio book, which is the whole reason I even found out about Smalltalk and hence discovered Squeak about 4 years ago!
Rob
Fun interview! At one point, Leo laments an absence of literary coverage of PARC's1979 demo for Apple and its ramifications. It's out there. One interesting source is "Fire in the Valley, the Making of the Personal Computer"[1] by Paul Freiberger (another ex-Intervalite) and Michael Swaine, which was also the basis for the hilarious film "Pirates of Silicon Valley"[2]. There's even a scene featuring that demo, complete with an indignant rendering of Adele. :) And there's also the documentary "Triumph of the Nerds"[3], featuring appearances from many of the actual people.
Another source is the classic (infamous?) "Fumbling the Future: HowXerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer"[4], by Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander, which Leo even attempts to mention (he can't quite remember the title).
And there's always folklore.org, which recounts many interesting Appleanecdotes from back in the day.
thanks again!-C
[1] http://www.fireinthevalley.com [2] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168122 [3] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115398 [4] http://tinyurl.com/64fv2u (amazon.com)
-- Craig Latta improvisational musical informaticist www.netjam.org Smalltalkers do: [:it | All with: Class, (And love: it)]
I enjoyed it, too. However, I like to nitpick, too^^;
Leo seems to be caught in the typical trap of thinking that the mouse was from Xerox PARC (Dan corrected it along the line, but it still came up at the end), and PARC didn't make Xerox any money. (The invention of laser printer alone paid for investment in PARC. It is true that they could have made *huge* money, but it is wrong to say that they didn't make profit.)
And this is my own preference and people has different taste, the host changes the subject too often. Dan formulates long sentences and talks calmly, but the host interrupts often and a few things got ununswered. I know some people like that style, though. (When it comes to Disney and embedded project, I wished the Parks PDA project was mentioned. If he waited a few more seconds, Dan might have thought of it^^;)
-- Yoshiki
I enjoyed it too.
I also felt that Dan was interrupted and the subject was changed too often. What I would have liked Dan to talk about is his coming back to the Squeak community as a member of the Board, his plans and expectations. I'd also liked to hear his thoughts about the FONC project. I mean, a little more focus on the future!
BTW, in the interview it was said that the Lisa was a Smalltalk machine. I looked a bit in the web and could find nothing about this. Perhaps this was a mistake, and the Lisa OS and dev tools were Pascal based?
Another note on the Lisa. The chief designer was Larry tesler, right? The "don't mode me in" guy. However, the Lisa had eight modes. The 7/7 applications and the dev environment... If it had been a Smalltalk machine, it could have been modeless.
Cheers, Juan Vuletich
Yoshiki Ohshima wrote:
I enjoyed it, too. However, I like to nitpick, too^^;
Leo seems to be caught in the typical trap of thinking that the mouse was from Xerox PARC (Dan corrected it along the line, but it still came up at the end), and PARC didn't make Xerox any money. (The invention of laser printer alone paid for investment in PARC. It is true that they could have made *huge* money, but it is wrong to say that they didn't make profit.)
And this is my own preference and people has different taste, the host changes the subject too often. Dan formulates long sentences and talks calmly, but the host interrupts often and a few things got ununswered. I know some people like that style, though. (When it comes to Disney and embedded project, I wished the Parks PDA project was mentioned. If he waited a few more seconds, Dan might have thought of it^^;)
-- Yoshiki
2008/5/25 Juan Vuletich juan@jvuletich.org:
I enjoyed it too.
I also felt that Dan was interrupted and the subject was changed too often. What I would have liked Dan to talk about is his coming back to the Squeak community as a member of the Board, his plans and expectations. I'd also liked to hear his thoughts about the FONC project. I mean, a little more focus on the future!
BTW, in the interview it was said that the Lisa was a Smalltalk machine. I looked a bit in the web and could find nothing about this. Perhaps this was a mistake, and the Lisa OS and dev tools were Pascal based?
Another note on the Lisa. The chief designer was Larry tesler, right? The "don't mode me in" guy. However, the Lisa had eight modes. The 7/7 applications and the dev environment... If it had been a Smalltalk machine, it could have been modeless.
What you mean by modes? Video modes or what?
Cheers, Juan Vuletich
-- Best regards, Igor Stasenko AKA sig.
Igor Stasenko wrote:
What you mean by modes? Video modes or what?
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_(computer_interface) . If you have it handy, check the Byte special issue on Smalltalk (August, 1981). A must read!
Cheers, Juan Vuletich
2008/5/25 Juan Vuletich juan@jvuletich.org:
Igor Stasenko wrote:
What you mean by modes? Video modes or what?
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_(computer_interface) . If you have it handy, check the Byte special issue on Smalltalk (August, 1981). A must read!
Oh, it was so long ago, that i forgot this issue was ever exist :)
Cheers, Juan Vuletich
On Sun, 25 May 2008 09:44:00 -0300, Juan Vuletich juan@jvuletich.org wrote:
BTW, in the interview it was said that the Lisa was a Smalltalk machine. I looked a bit in the web and could find nothing about this. Perhaps this was a mistake, and the Lisa OS and dev tools were Pascal based?
I don't think the Lisa was a "Smalltalk machine" in the pure sense. It could run Apple Smalltalk, and is in fact the machine I got my first exposure to Smalltalk on, back in 1987. As I remember, it was basically a Mac, with a business focus.
Later, Jon
-------------------------------------------------------------- Jon Hylands Jon@huv.com http://www.huv.com/jon
Project: Micro Raptor (Small Biped Velociraptor Robot) http://www.huv.com/blog
Juan Vuletich wrote:
BTW, in the interview it was said that the Lisa was a Smalltalk machine. I looked a bit in the web and could find nothing about this. Perhaps this was a mistake, and the Lisa OS and dev tools were Pascal based?
See the "Smalltalk machines" on page 5 of the "orange book". On the top left you will see the Lisa.
http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/TheInteractiveProgrammingEnv/TheIn...
Xerox licensed Smalltalk to Apple, Tektronix, DEC and HP (the one that they couldn't remember in the interview) under very generous terms in exchange for them helping make it ready for general release by having local teams do a port and debug the "blue book" as a result.
A special object-oriented Pascal was developed for the Lisa. Much of that software was rewritten in 68000 assembly language for the Mac.
Another note on the Lisa. The chief designer was Larry tesler, right? The "don't mode me in" guy. However, the Lisa had eight modes. The 7/7 applications and the dev environment... If it had been a Smalltalk machine, it could have been modeless.
There were applications that ran side by side on the same screen and even the notion of applications was partly hidden behind prototype documents. So it was a bit more modeless than the Mac.
History is a complicated thing. Jef Raskin liked to say that he pushed Steve Jobs to make that visit so he would get a clue and quit trying to kill Jef's graphical Mac project when the Lisa was a text-only minicomputer. Bill Atkinson said "I think mostly what...what we got in that hour and a half was inspiration and just sort of basically a bolstering of our convictions that a more graphical way to do things would make this business computer more accessible." (http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part3.html)
The Xerox Star came out about the same time as the IBM PC (way before the Lisa and the Mac) and was described in detail in at least one Byte magazine article. So I was very familiar with it back in 1982 and was using these ideas in my own designs, but it seems that nobody at Apple knew anything at all about it. If the people who were there can't agree on what happened, we certainly will never know for sure.
-- Jecel
"Yoshiki" == Yoshiki Ohshima yoshiki@vpri.org writes:
Yoshiki> And this is my own preference and people has different taste, the Yoshiki> host changes the subject too often. Dan formulates long sentences and Yoshiki> talks calmly, but the host interrupts often and a few things got Yoshiki> ununswered. I know some people like that style, though. (When it Yoshiki> comes to Disney and embedded project, I wished the Parks PDA project Yoshiki> was mentioned. If he waited a few more seconds, Dan might have Yoshiki> thought of it^^;)
We tape the show over skype, and Leo and I can't pass notes very well, because it's hard for me to type to Leo, listen to the guest(s), and still keep my own train of thought going. Leo wanted to make sure to cover each of Dan's bio points, and so he kept driving the conversation forward... there was a *lot* to cover (even given the 90 minute format). On the other hand, I was much more interested in the Apple crossover, and the creation of Squeak, and the Lively Kernel, so I kept trying to bring it back to those points.
Sometimes, Leo as the "everyman" and me as the "geek" works very well. This time, I'm sorry to say, it was a bit distracting as we had somewhat opposite goals.
Overall, I'm very happy with this interview though. And based on the feedback I'm getting, most of you were happy as well.
Sometimes, Leo as the "everyman" and me as the "geek" works very well. This time, I'm sorry to say, it was a bit distracting as we had somewhat opposite goals.
I have too much insider knowledge and doesn't have typical audience mindset. So, don't worry about my feedback.
Overall, I'm very happy with this interview though. And based on the feedback I'm getting, most of you were happy as well.
As I wrote, I enjoyed the interview, and I think that having Dan's thought and experience recorded in various ways is important.
Thank you for taking time to reply to me. It never happened before so that is nice^^;
-- Yoshiki
squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org
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Brad Fuller -
Craig Latta -
Igor Stasenko -
Janko Mivšek -
Jecel Assumpcao Jr -
Jon Hylands -
Juan Vuletich -
merlyn＠stonehenge.com -
Rob Rothwell -
Yoshiki Ohshima