JohnnyT

Code, music, and other stuff.

Early Smalltalk and Apple

I just read this great section from The Early History of Smalltalk:

By now it was already 1979, and we found ourselves doing one of our many demos, but this time for a very interested audience: Steve Jobs, Jeff Raskin, and other technical people from Apple. They had started a project called Lisa but weren’t quite sure what it should be like, until Jeff said to Steve, “You should really come over to PARC and see what they ae doing.” Thus, more than eight years after overlapping windows had been invented and more than six years after the ALTO started running, the people who could really do something about the ideas, finally to to see them. … Larry Tesler gave the main part of the demo with Dan sitting in the copilot’s chair and Adele and I watched from the rear. One of the best parts of the demo was when Steve Jobs said he didn’t like the blt-style scrolling we were using and asked if we cold do it in a smooth continuous style. In less than a minute Dan found the methods involved, made the (relatively major) changes and scrolling was now continuous! This shocked the visitors, espeicially the programmers among them, as they had never seen a really powerful incremental system before.

Alan KayThe Early History of Smalltalk