The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk
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Allen Wirfs-Brock
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The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk
on June 2, 2020
in<br>History,<br>Smalltalk
Relics
Gilad Bracha recently posted an article "Bits of History, Words of Advice" that talks about the incredible influence of Smalltalk but bemoans the fact that:
…today Smalltalk is relegated to a small niche of true believers. Whenever two or more Smalltalkers gather over drinks, the question is debated: Why?
(All block quotes are from Gilad’s article unless otherwise noted.)
Smalltalk actually had a surge of commercial popularity in the first half of the 1990s but that interest evaporated almost instantaneously in 1996. Most of the Gilad’s article consists of his speculations on why that happened. I agree with many of Gilad’s takes on this subject, but his involvement and perspective with Smalltalk started relatively late in the commercial Smalltalk lifecycle. I was there pretty much at the beginning so it seems appropriate to add some additional history and my own personal perspective. I’ll be directly responding to some of Gilad’s points, so you should probably read his post before continuing.
Let’s Start with Some History
Gilad worked on the Strongtalk implementation of Smalltalk that was developed in the mid-1990s. His post describes the world of Smalltalk as he saw it during that period. But to get a more complete understanding we will start with an overview of what had occurred over the previous twenty years.
1970-1979: Creation
Starting in the early 1970s the early Smalltalkers and other Xerox PARC researchers invented the concepts and mechanisms of Personal Computing, most of which are still dominant today. Guided by Alan Kay’s vision, Dan Ingalls along with Ted Kaehler, Adele Goldberg, Larry Tesler, and other members of the PARC Learning Research Group created Smalltalk as the software for the Dynabook, their aspirational model of a personal computer. Smalltalk wasn’t just a programming language—it was, using today’s terminology, a complete software application platform and development environment running on the bare metal of dedicated personal supercomputers. During this time, the Smalltalk language and system evolved through at least five major versions.
1980-1984: Dissemination and Frustration
In the 1970s, the outside world only saw hints and fleeting glimpses of was what was going on within the Learning Research Group. Their work influenced the design of the Xerox Star family of office machines and after Steve Jobs got a Smalltalk demo he hired away Larry Tesler to work on the Apple Lisa. But the LRG team (later called SCG for Software Concepts Group) wanted to directly expose their work (Smalltalk) to the world at large. They developed a version of their software, Smalltalk-80, that would be suitable for distribution outside of Xerox and wrote about it in a series of books and a special issue of the widely read Byte magazine. They also made a memory snapshot of their Smalltalk-80 implementation available to several companies that they thought had the hardware expertise to build the microcoded custom processors that they thought were needed to run Smalltalk. The hope was that the companies would design and sell Smalltalk-based computers similar to the one they were using at Xerox PARC.
But none of the collaborators did this. Instead of building microcoded Smalltalk processors they used economical mini-computers or commodity microprocessor-based systems and coded what were essentially simple software emulations of the Xerox super computer Smalltalk machines. The initial results were very disappointing. They could nominally run the Xerox provided Smalltalk memory image but at speeds 10–100 times slower than the machines being used at PARC. This was extremely frustrating as their implementations were too slow to do meaningful work with the Smalltalk platform. Most of the original external collaborators eventually gave up on Smalltalk.
But a few groups, such as me and my colleagues at Tektronix, L Peter Deutsch and Alan Schiffman at Xerox, and Dave Ungar at UC Berkley developed new techniques leading to drastically better Smalltalk-80 performance using commodity microprocessors with 32-bit architectures.
At the same time Jim Anderson, George Bosworth, and their colleagues, working exclusive from the Byte articles independently developed a new Smalltalk that could usefully run on the original IBM PC with its Intel 8088 processor.
1985-1989: Productization
By 1985, it was possible to actually use Smalltalk on affordable hardware and various groups went about releasing Smalltalk products. In January 1985 my group at Tektronix shipped the first of a series of "AI Workstations" that were specifically...