nickpsecurityon Lobsters • Recommends
Alan Kay Demos the Original, PARC GUI from Rescued Disc
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#alankay#tednelson#smalltalk-78
Alan Kay's tribute to Ted Nelson at "Intertwingled" Festival
TheTedNelson
10K subscribers • 8 videos on Hallway
- Recommended by 9 people: 7 on Hacker News and 2 on Lobsters.
- A classic. People kept recommending it from 2015 to 2025.
- Presented by Alan Kay, pioneer of object-oriented programming and personal computing
Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.
41K views12 years ago9 recommendations
History and cultureProgramming languagesHistory of computingPeople who shaped computingLanguage design and type systems
Alan Kay presents a tribute to Ted Nelson using a resurrected Smalltalk-78 system running on emulated Xerox PARC hardware.
It was late arriving on disk, but better late than never :)Why it's here
9 people recommend thisWhat people say. Engineers point to this demo to show the highly programmable, composable nature of early Xerox PARC systems compared to modern OSes.
Moments people linked to
kennethfriedmanon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Then and Now: How Little Things Have Changed (2016)”
OP here. Definitely some improvements... but (at least in my eyes) incremental. Notebooks are pretty sweet, but in the hands of very few. They're definitely growing in popularity, which is great. But even the "notebook" concept is a very limited "low pass filter" version of the visions of Engelbart, AKay, TN, etc. The video that AKay has been sharing around in the post than @dang linked to0 is a great example of what's not-even-close to possible on today's systems. 0 link to this video
ryukafalzon Hacker News • Recommends
On “50 Years Later, We’re Still Living in the Xerox Alto’s World”
The Alto did things that even modern computers don't do as well. There's a demo I like to point at for this: link to this video Look how programmable this is by the user! Today's OSes and their division of software into "applications" erect barriers to software composition that don't need to be there.
animatronicon Lobsters • Recommends
Alan Kay's tribute to Ted Nelson at "Intertwingled" Fest
alankayon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true”
…revived a version of the Xerox Parc software from 1978 that Xerox had thrown away (it was rescued from a trash heap). This system was the vintage that Steve Jobs saw the next year when he visited in 1979. I used this system to make a presentation for a Ted Nelson tribute. It should start at 2:15. See what you think about what happens around 9:05. link to this video Next year will be the 50 anniversary of this idea, and many things have happened since then, so it would be crazy to hark back to a set of ideas that were in the context of being able to be built over 10 years, and would be ridiculous if we didn't have in 30 (that would be 1998, almost 20 years ago). The large idea of ARPA/PARC was that des…
seltzered_on Hacker News • Recommends
On “Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?”
…ware Development, and Why We Believe It’s True - link steve wittens - making webgl dance - the title is deceptive, it's in some ways a visual crash course in linear algebra - link glenn vanderburg - software engineering doesn't work - link chris granger - in search of tomorrow - link alan kay - tribute to ted nelson at intertwingled fest - link to this video bret victor - this is already mentioned but if I had to pick one it'd be 'the humane representation of thought' - link #Hardwarish: saul griffith - soft, not solid: beyond traditional hardware engineering - link deb chachra - Architectural Biology and Biological Architectures - link #Getting more meta in technology and history: James…
shalabhcon Hacker News • Recommends
On “The Early History Of Smalltalk (1993)”
To get another taste of the kinds of systems possible in the 70s, in spite of the constraints, see Kay's demo of a revived Smalltalk-78 system: link to this video (I believe this system is about 10-20K LOC software in total) Notes about the the revival are here: link
alankayon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Why OO Sucks by Joe Armstrong (2000)”
…would be a much more powerful and comprehensive way to create most things on a computer, and most especially for personal computers. At Parc, I think we were able to make our point. Around 2014 or so we brought back to life the NoteTaker Smalltalk from 1978, and I used it to make my visual material for a tribute to Ted Nelson. See what you think. link to this video This system --including everything -- "OS", SDK, Media, GUI, Tools, and the content -- is about 10,000 lines of Smalltalk-78 code sitting on top of about 6K bytes of machine code (the latter was emulated to get the whole system going). I think what happened is that the early styles of programming, especially "data structures, procedures, im…
pjmlpon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Try APL”
> Thanks for sharing, I love these types of stories. Really makes me pine for the "old" days, and wonder if there's a parallel universe where technology took a very different route such that languages like APL, Lisp, and Smalltalk are used instead of JavaScript, Java, and C#, and what that world looks like. Easy, here is some time travel, "Alan Kay's tribute to Ted Nelson at "Intertwingled" Festival" link to this video "Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar" link "Yesterday's Computer of Tomorrow: The Xerox Alto │Smalltalk-76 Demo" link However to be fair, Java, C# and Swift alongside their IDEs are the closest in mainstream languages to that experience, unless you get to use Allegro, LispWorks or Pharo.
infinite8son Hacker News • Recommends
On “PineNote Developer Edition – E-Paper Tablet”
Well, something like the smalltalk-78 that Alan Kay demos here ( link to this video ) would be an ideal starting interface for e-ink based tablet.
ryukafalzon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Emacs Is Not Enough”
Every time I see something like this, I'm also reminded of this demo of the Xerox Alto from a few years back. I'll link to the start of the most relevant piece: link to this video I'm always struck by the useful directions that desktop computers were going in the 70s, and how computing could be so much better than it is right now. But we've veered so off-course from all of this, away from composability and towards independent boxes ("applications") that can't talk to each other at all. Emacs is in some ways the best thing we have today in the other direction, but it pales in comparison to what's possible.
ryukafalzon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Mercury OS”
I love that this concept tries to separate content from apps. Ever since I saw some of the ways early GUIs differed from today's, I've had a feeling that we've lost something with the way apps in today's desktops are completely isolated from each other. The Alto let you compose data live from multiple windows kind of like a shell pipeline does for command-line apps: link to this video The Locus and Flows in this concept seem like they could enable a similar workflow, as data isn't confined to "apps" the way it usually would be.
seltzered_on Hacker News • Recommends
On “Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps”
In the 'Tools, not Apps' part of the article they reference Michel Beaudouin-Lafon's talk 'A World Without Apps' which goes back in time and shows the Xerox Star operating system: link Another reference I usually bring up is Alan Kay's talk on smalltalk: link to this video My related comments on this, just to show other stories along this theme: - link - link - link
alankay1on Hacker News • Mentions
On “Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today”
When I write code it is usually either "kiddicode" for future "kiddilanguages" or "metacode" (for future languages ".") I did have a lot of fun last year writing code in a resurrected version of the Notetaker Smalltalk-78 (done mostly by Dan Ingalls and Bert Freudenberg from a rescued disk pack that Xerox had thrown away) to create a visual presentation for a tribute to Ted Nelson on his 70th birthday: link to this video This particular system was a wonderful sweet spot for those days -- it was hugely expressive and quite small and understandable (my size). (This was the Smalltalk system that Steve Jobs saw the next year in 1979 -- though with fewer pictures because of memory limitations back then).
shalabhcon Hacker News • Mentions
On “The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI”
An easy way to try ST-72 is in your browser here: link and ST-78 here: link The above links run emulators in Javascript and have been used for live demos as well (see link to this video for a fun one) Related, for a Javascript based live system check out link (also created by Dan Ingalls).
seltzered_on Hacker News • Mentions
On “Systems, not Programs”
“The real goal is to design the form and nature of the software ‘entities’ — the ‘programmable substrate’ that we manipulate and compose when we program and use the system” Reminded me of bret victors “toolkits, not apps” comment ( link ) and an excerpt from the smalltalk era : link to this video