Hi all

Thanks for all these notes.
While reading them, I was thinking that they could make a really 
fascinating book.
Dealer of lightning is good but a book really focused on the Smalltalk 
pionners would be really
interesting. May be collecting all the material into a dedicated wiki 
would be a first step.

Stef

I know that inventing the future is more fun that chatting about the 
past but still...



On Tuesday, March 18, 2003, at 08:40 AM, Dan Ingalls wrote:

> "Sohodojo Jim" <salmons at sohodojo.com> wrote...
>> 	A 16 MHz 68020, with a math coprocessor, 4 MB of contiguous RAM 
>> (man, we
>> thought we were flying when the most memory we had in our Fat Mac 
>> prior to
>> the Prodigy was 512K!)... and the first commercial SCSI hard drive 
>> interface
>> (our first Prodigy had a whooping 10 MB INTERNAL hard drive... that's 
>> right,
>> the Levco guys figured out how to safely and effectively fit the 
>> Prodigy
>> daughterboard AND a 'chimney-based' internal hard drive into the 
>> original
>> Mac case!)... This was truly an amazing and groundbreaking machine.
>
> Yes, there was definitely something magical about this level of 
> performance.  We had the same experience inside Apple when we got hold 
> of a couple of prototype "Big Macs" built by Rich Page that coupled a 
> 16Mhz 68020 to a 1024x768 (monochrome) display.  Until this time, much 
> of our Smalltalk and UI work was guided by a sort of intuition about 
> what should be simple and what not, but always we were sort of 
> drumming our fingers waiting for the processor to complete these 
> wonderfully streamlined operations (things like find all senders, add 
> an instance variable, etc), and unable to really use more than a 
> couple of windows on screens smaller than VGA.
>
> Then, suddenly, all the design for interaction paid off almost 
> overnight,with the arrival of that next generation of hardware.  It 
> was heady stuff.  I remember Scott Wallace was doing a lot of the 
> heavy work on Fabrik in our group at the time.  He would typically 
> work at home for a day or two and then come in to compare notes and 
> exchange a demo or two.  When he got his Big Mac, he simply didn't 
> come in or call in for two weeks.  Finally I called his home just to 
> check that he was OK, and found him nearly expired.  As I recall he 
> said something like, although we had built this incredible system in 
> which you could literally change anything and keep running, until that 
> time processor speed  and screen real estate had kept our ambitions in 
> check.  Now, at a single stroke, those barriers had simply vanished, 
> and we could just go on doing one thing after another with nothing to 
> hold us back except, ultimately, our ability to stay awake.
>
> 	- Dan
>
>
Prof. Dr. Stéphane DUCASSE (ducasse at iam.unibe.ch) 
http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~ducasse/
  "if you knew today was your last day on earth, what would you do 
different? ...  especially if,
  by doing something different, today might not be your last day on 
earth" Calvin&Hobbes

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it..." Alan Kay.

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www.gnu.org/software/smalltalk/smalltalk.html
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