Alan, > 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.
Fair enough! Having the table of contents but not the text made me think that perhaps the section B.6.b.ii The Disk as a Serial "Associative Memory" and B.6.c. An Associativeley Mapped LSI Memory might be interesting in light of Ian's latest paper. Or the first part might be more related to OOZE instead. > 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. Was being able to input drawings one of the good things? There was one Lisp GUI that put a lot of effort into allowing you to input objects instead of just text. It did that by outputting text but keeping track of where it came from. So if you pointed to the text generated by listing the contents of a disk directory while there was some program waiting for input, that program would read the actual entry object. It is frustrating for me that while the Squeak VM could easily handle an expression like myView add: <yellowEllipseMorph> copy. I have no way of typing that. I can't use any object as a literal nor as input. In Etoys I can get close enough by getting a tile representing the yellowEllpiseMorph from its halo and use that in expressions. In Self I could add a constant slot with some easy to type value, like 0, and then drag the arrow from that slot to point to the object I really wanted. It was a bit indirect but it worked and I used this a lot. The nice thing about having something like this is that you never need global variable again. > 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). True. You were lucky to have them, though perhaps we might say Bob Taylor had built that luck into PARC. -- Jecel _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
