1 year ago

It’s not just that much of the modern world of computers grew out of work done in the 1970s at https://www.parc.com/about-parc/parc-history/. Yes, in a very real sense it inspired the form of our hardware, our user interfaces, and even our programming methodologies. But beyond all of that, what’s equally interesting is how they did it — the motivations and the passions that led them to those creations.

As the Computer History Museum puts it in https://computerhistory.org/blog/smalltalk-at-50/, “Kay believed that such computers would transform education for both children and adults by enabling them to simulate and model the real world.

The event was moderated by former New York Times technology reporter John Markoff — also a staff historian at the Computer History Museum — who noted that Smalltalk is credited with “being the world in which the graphical user interface came into the world.”