The Flex Machine was "the omelet you have to throw away to clean the pan", so I
haven't put any effort into saving that history. But there were "4 or 5" pretty
good things and "4 or 5" really bad things that helped the Alto-Smalltalk
effort a few years later. I'd say that the huge factors after having tried to
do one of these were two geniuses: Chuck Thacker (who was an infinitely better
hardware designer and builder than I was), and Dan Ingalls (who was infinitely
better at most phases of software design and implementation than I was).
Cheers,
Alan
>________________________________
>From: Jecel Assumpcao Jr. <je...@merlintec.com>
>To: Alan Kay <alan.n...@yahoo.com>; Fundamentals of New Computing
><fonc@vpri.org>
>Sent: Wednesday, August 31, 2011 3:09 PM
>Subject: Re: [fonc] Re: Ceres and Oberon
>
>Alan,
>
>thanks for the detailed history!
>
>> 1966 was the year I entered grad school (having programmed for 4-5 years,
>> but essentially knowing nothing about computer science). Shortly after
>> encounters with and lightning bolts from the sky induced by Sketchpad and
>> Simula, I found the Euler papers and thought you could make something with
>> "objects" that would be nicer if you used Euler for a basis rather than how
>> Simula was built on Algol. That turned out to be the case and I built this
>> into
>> the table-top plus display plus pointing device personal computer Ed Cheadle
>> and I made over the next few years.
>
>Is this available anywhere beyond the small fragments at
>
>http://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/kay68.html
>
>and
>
>http://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/kay69.html
>
>?
>
>Though you often mention the machine itself, I have never seen you put
>these texts in the list of what people should read like you do with
>Ivan's thesis.
>
>> The last time I looked at Oberon (at Apple more than 15 years ago) it did
>> not impress, and did not resemble anything I would call an object-oriented
>> language -- or an advance on anything that was already done in the 70s.
>> But that's just my opinion. And perhaps it has improved since then.
>
>It was an attempt to step back from the complexity of Modula-2, which is
>a good thing. It has the FONC goal of being small enough to be
>completely read and understood by one person (he does mention that this
>is in the form of a 600 page book in the talk).
>
>In the early 1990s I was trying to build a really low cost computer
>around the Self language and a professor who always had interesting
>insights suggested that something done with Oberon would require fewer
>hardware resources. I studied the language and saw that they had
>recently made it object oriented:
>
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon-2_%28programming_language%29
>
>But it turned out that this was a dead end and the then current system
>was built with the original, non object oriented version of the language
>(as it is to this day - the OO programming Wirth mentioned in the talk
>is the kind of thing you can do in plain C). I liked the size of the
>system, but the ALL CAPS code hurt my eyes and the user interface was
>awkward (both demonstrators in the movie had problems using it, though
>Wirth had the excuse that he hadn't used it in a long time).
>
>-- Jecel
>
>
>
>
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