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The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI

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Re: The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI

#31

Post by igouy »

uytuijhgj wrote: post #25
igouy wrote: post #23

> If you're used to Java or C++, this object-oriented code may look strange, especially since Smalltalk uses some strange characters. It's Smalltalk-76 that uses some strange characters. The version that made it out of the lab into the wide-world was Smalltalk-80. edited With help from Paolo Bonzini, Smalltalk-80 syntax for that square root code would be something more qwerty-friendly like: sqrt | guess | (self "I Ca…

From your link: Finally, let’s insist that the separators be part of the method name; i.e., let’s require that the name of the method be “rotate by: around:” and let’s get rid of the spaces to get “rotateby:around:” as the name and finally, let’s capitalize internal words just for readability to get “rotateBy:around:”. Then our example could be written rotateBy: a around: v //This is Smalltalk This is also what Objec…

> This is also what Objective-C / Apple does.

Inspired by Smalltalk-80.

See "A short history of Objective-C"

https://medium.com/chmcore/a-short-history-of-objective-c-af...

Re: The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI

#32

Post by setr »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #29
mncharity wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big incoming UI challenge is XR. But as with ST/Alto, it's an integrated bootstrap problem of hardware, system design, foundational software, user software, and UI. Absent research labs, we wait on market availability for hardware. For the modern analogues of mice and bitmapped screens. Eye tracking may be cheap next year, but now it's $2k. High-resolution HMDs may be $10k next year, but now they're simply unavai…

VR has a huge input problem, you can't touch any of the 3D stuff, you are basically left waving hands in the air. Bret Victor's lab is going in the other direction of tangible objects with digital projections.

There's really no reason we can't treat it like navigating a video game; movement and interation through the normal kb+m/controller model; the helmet is just the monitor, with a bigger pov (due to head turning)

Im not sure why there's a belief that you need to pretend you physically exist in the vr world; you just need to be able to interact with, and navigate, for it to be sufficiently valuable. ie imagine using it as an infinite real-estate development environment, with possibly a visual layout of your data structures, and the ability to change location (ie a mountain top view). Its sufficiently valuable as a product with just this basic featureset.

We don't need to wait for full-body VR, or AR, though no one seems to believe it

Re: The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI

#33

Post by setr »

mncharity wrote: post #17
setr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine the big issue is that the underlying model isn't actually being changed to support the new UI (even by a wrapper-layer); so you're just doing shallow edits to the "skin" of the OS. The problem being the underlying model and the WIMP model have been co-evolving, and likely aren't very open to other fashions of interaction. Presumably, the way to beat it out is to figure out how to change both to instantiate…

The big incoming UI challenge is XR. But as with ST/Alto, it's an integrated bootstrap problem of hardware, system design, foundational software, user software, and UI. Absent research labs, we wait on market availability for hardware. For the modern analogues of mice and bitmapped screens. Eye tracking may be cheap next year, but now it's $2k. High-resolution HMDs may be $10k next year, but now they're simply unavai…

I wasn't really referring to how you physically interact with the system. More along the lines of: if you implement a 3D environment of your files, but you're still interacting with a directory/file model, then you've just constructed a less efficient interface. But if you can now move on to some kind of 3 dimensional, or n-dimensional model, maybe there's something to gain with the 3D interface.

Theres little point representing 2D structures in a 3D environment. You have to change what you're representing as well to see any fundamental benefits.

Re: The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI

#34

Post by KGIII »

bsaul wrote: post #14

i wonder what's today's equivalent to this pionnering technologies... biotech gene editing ? quantum computers ? artificial intelligence ? Cars ? Is there someone somewhere discovering the ubiquitous usage of the next decades ? Does computer science still has the potential to bring the same kind of world-changing tools ? Here's something i'd like to ask AlanKay : at that time, you probably had the feeling that you we…

I am not he, but I may be able to offer some history/perspective.

There was a real fear of computers back then, much like the fear of AI today. They worried that the 'big brain' would put people out of work and take over the world. Multiple movies were made where the computer was the antagonist, including the famous 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The first computer I ever touched was called a calculator and I've heard a couple of reasons for this. The official reason was that people expected computers to be big and the HP 9100A wasn't very big by standards of the day. The second, and unofficial reason, was that it came out in the late 1960s, which was at a time when people had a real fear of computers.

If you're curious, I believe the model I used was the 9100B. It supported magnetic strip cards and punch cards to store your algorithm. You'd load it into the memory by swiping the card or inserting the punch card. It would output to a TV and there was a plotter option that functioned pretty much like a modern plotter. There was also a dot-matrix printer included that was like what was on the older POS systems for receipt printing.

Anyhow, they called it a calculator instead of a computer. People had notions of what a computer was supposed to be and this was not that.

At the time, I didn't really appreciate it for what it was. I think my first exposure was in 1971 and it was used almost exclusively in the physics and astronomy labs. It wouldn't be used in the astronomy labs until later, after the observatory was completed and the telescope put in.

This was all at Kents Hill, no apostrophe, if you'd like to learn more about it. It's a boarding prep school located in Central Maine. As I was leaving, we got a mainframe connection to Dartmouth, which was a 'real' computer, though I never played with it.

So, largely people didn't seem to envision much for the future of computing, at least not at the personal level. There were exceptions, some visionaries who saw the potential, but the idea of a personal computer wouldn't really exist until later in the decade. Frankly, nobody saw much use for one. Computers were pretty useless without a great deal of domain knowledge. To use one, you were almost required to know how to program one. Specialty software was the norm and interaction was limited without knowing how to program.

For the most part, games were also limited to hardware specific devices and were console format or, eventually, arcade games that were not general purpose computers. People really didn't have much use for one in their homes and, as mentioned above, there was a real fear of computers.

YouTube has a copy of the HP 9100 promotional video. I can dig it out, if you want. It was pretty remarkable but I wasn't nearly as impressed by it as I should have been. So, I don't really think that the future of computing was obvious to everyone. In fact, I'd say the opposite was true and that it was only obvious to a very limited set of visionaries.

Edited to clean up some verbiage and add a wee bit more information about the 9100.

Edit again. If you have 21 spare minutes and would like to learn about the HP 9100, you can click this link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki1Inux1_wU

(I figure some folks might actually be curious about the tech of the day. That was pretty state-of-the-art back then and far more compute power than most people would be exposed to for the next decade and a half, if not longer.)

Re: The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI

#35

Post by mncharity »

scroot wrote: post #27
mncharity wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big incoming UI challenge is XR. But as with ST/Alto, it's an integrated bootstrap problem of hardware, system design, foundational software, user software, and UI. Absent research labs, we wait on market availability for hardware. For the modern analogues of mice and bitmapped screens. Eye tracking may be cheap next year, but now it's $2k. High-resolution HMDs may be $10k next year, but now they're simply unavai…

The eleVR people have some interesting demos in this regard, where you program from inside the VR system. That might be the best way to try things out and conduct the "foundational work"

> "foundational work"

Hmm, I was ambiguous there. What I had in mind for "foundational" was, for example, constraint engines for GUI layout. Now we have CSS. But there was something like a decade, where we knew constraints were a good way to do UI layout, but there weren't available constraint engines. Each major language had odd bits of abandonware zombies, academic or hobby projects, with code which might or might not be online, or be buildable, or be licensed for use. So we had to wait for market incentives to change, and some non-trivial work to be done, before we had the foundation element of GUI constraint-based layout.

An Alto analogy might be bitmapped fonts and display.

A current analogy might be 3D dynamic structured graph layout. There's been a lot of research over the years on how to dynamically modify graphs without disorienting viewers. And on how to layout graphs within graphs, and with various spatial constraints. But last time I checked, the github cupboard was bare. So say you want to write a really wizzy todo app with complex dependencies. Well, first you read two decades of graph layout papers; then you write the graph layout library no one else has gotten to yet. Foundational work on our collective todo list.

Re: The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI

#36

Post by bonzini »

igouy wrote: post #23

> If you're used to Java or C++, this object-oriented code may look strange, especially since Smalltalk uses some strange characters. It's Smalltalk-76 that uses some strange characters. The version that made it out of the lab into the wide-world was Smalltalk-80. edited With help from Paolo Bonzini, Smalltalk-80 syntax for that square root code would be something more qwerty-friendly like: sqrt | guess | (self "I Ca…

The "instfield" line is halving the exponent. In Smalltalk-80 you could write it

    guess := self timesTwoPower: self exponent // -2.
Also, "user notify:" would become "self error:". Modern Smalltalk actually has complete exception handling, so you could also define an exception class (for example ArgumentOutOfRange) and trap it.

Re: The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI

#37

Post by mncharity »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #29
mncharity wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big incoming UI challenge is XR. But as with ST/Alto, it's an integrated bootstrap problem of hardware, system design, foundational software, user software, and UI. Absent research labs, we wait on market availability for hardware. For the modern analogues of mice and bitmapped screens. Eye tracking may be cheap next year, but now it's $2k. High-resolution HMDs may be $10k next year, but now they're simply unavai…

VR has a huge input problem, you can't touch any of the 3D stuff, you are basically left waving hands in the air. Bret Victor's lab is going in the other direction of tangible objects with digital projections.

> tangible objects with digital projections

You can also use tangible objects with XR. It might be useful for sorting things, like system subparts, and thinking with your hands. You can fit camera tracking markers on 1 cm wooden cubes.

> you can't touch any of the 3D stuff

The current controller "tock" impulse haptics can be surprisingly effective. Your brain fills in a lot. But no, no force feedback or individual finger haptics is mass market yet.

Re: The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI

#38

Post by peterburkimsher »

gumby wrote: post #16
fairpx wrote: post #2

It's fascinating how the GUI's haven't changed much since. I run a UI design agency (we work mostly with startups) but would love to collaborate with someone who's working on a (niche?) OS and see if we can redesign the UI. Open Source is fine. If you're working on something, hit me up. Details in my bio :)

> It's fascinating how the GUI's haven't changed much since. I think you mean WIMP GUIs haven't changed much (and indeed, the WIMP interfaces of the classic Mac, Windows, current Mac, Apollo, Sun all felt very much like the Smalltalk GUI to me). But I think the tile+touch interface pioneered on the iPhone is indeed a new GUI paradigm which shrugged off the baby-boomer "desktop" metaphor. These shifts require a change…

Something I see on the Xerox Alto and the Mac, but not on Windows, is Column View.

Miller columns are just intuitive for me when browsing a directory structure. I still don't know why Windows hasn't implemented it natively.

Re: The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI

#39

Post by mncharity »

setr wrote: post #33
mncharity wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big incoming UI challenge is XR. But as with ST/Alto, it's an integrated bootstrap problem of hardware, system design, foundational software, user software, and UI. Absent research labs, we wait on market availability for hardware. For the modern analogues of mice and bitmapped screens. Eye tracking may be cheap next year, but now it's $2k. High-resolution HMDs may be $10k next year, but now they're simply unavai…

I wasn't really referring to how you physically interact with the system. More along the lines of: if you implement a 3D environment of your files, but you're still interacting with a directory/file model , then you've just constructed a less efficient interface. But if you can now move on to some kind of 3 dimensional, or n-dimensional model, maybe there's something to gain with the 3D interface. Theres little point…

Nod.

Though just relaxing the severe real estate constraints of screens may be a big deal. It's much easier for tooling to provide speculative content when its "off to the side, just in case you care" rather than "in you face, covering what you were working on". So various existing "cute... but it's just not worth the cost of dealing with" ideas might become viable. Code analytics and documentation could be ever present, accessible at glance, just off to the side.

That's one fun XR puzzle game. Given a domain where you deeply understand the constraints which determine some system shape, ponder what will change as XR alters the UI constraints. And what approaches already tried, might deserve another look.

Re: The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI

#40

Post by seanmcdirmid »

mncharity wrote: post #37
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VR has a huge input problem, you can't touch any of the 3D stuff, you are basically left waving hands in the air. Bret Victor's lab is going in the other direction of tangible objects with digital projections.

> tangible objects with digital projections You can also use tangible objects with XR. It might be useful for sorting things, like system subparts, and thinking with your hands. You can fit camera tracking markers on 1 cm wooden cubes. > you can't touch any of the 3D stuff The current controller "tock" impulse haptics can be surprisingly effective. Your brain fills in a lot. But no, no force feedback or individual fi…

I'm not as pessimistic as Bret Victor is about this (see http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...), but ya, haptics is an obvious solution.

I think voice input will be even more important, once we get conversational UIs going, XR will work much better with some pointing and voice input (as in Iron Man).

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