Marking Another Birthday for Smalltalk
If you’re interested in learning more about the early years of Smalltalk, the fascinating story behind ObjectStudio, and the history of Smalltalk’s journey to Cincom, you can find all the details right here.
Smalltalk, a programming language that predates popular platforms like Apple Macintosh, Microsoft Windows, Python, Java, and Objective-C, played a pivotal role in revolutionizing personal computing, graphical user interfaces, and programming languages. It was first developed 51 years ago at Xerox PARC in Alan Kay’s Learning Research Group, with the initial goal of aiding children in learning through computer usage.
In honor of Smalltalk’s 50th anniversary last year, the Computer History Museum organized a special event that featured Smalltalk pioneers and 2022 CHM Fellows, Adele Goldberg and Daniel Ingalls. During an engaging discussion moderated by John Markoff, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter, Goldberg and Ingalls delved into Smalltalk’s original educational purpose and its profound impact on object-oriented programming languages, development environments, and software engineering methodologies. Additionally, Alan Kay, the creator of Smalltalk, provided recorded remarks for this momentous occasion.
- You can watch this entire presentation here: https://youtu.be/PaOMiNku1_M
While object-oriented programming has been in existence since the 1970s, it wasn’t until 1997 that Cincom gained full ownership of ObjectStudio. And just two years later, in 1999, Cincom also acquired VisualWorks. These acquisitions played a crucial role in shaping the Cincom Smalltalk we know today. If you’re interested in learning more about the early years of Smalltalk, the fascinating story behind ObjectStudio, and the history of Smalltalk’s journey to Cincom, you can find all the details right here:
- The Early Years of Smalltalk
- The Dramatic Birth of ObjectStudio
- The Cincom Years with Smalltalk
- The Final Installment
Suzanne Fortman, the Cincom Smalltalk Program Director, Support and Engineering Manager, shared some thoughts about the 20th Anniversary of Cincom Smalltalk and talked about the day when Tom Nies added Smalltalk to the “table” with the other successful products at Cincom.
- You can watch that video here: https://youtu.be/X37IpKrbKaA