You know your article was worth writing when my idol, Sir Alan Curtis Kay, Smalltalk inventor, takes the time to comment on it!
The Internet is truly beautiful at bridging generations of knowledge in this way.
The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI
51–58 of 58 posts
Re: The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI
#52"Smalltalk is a highly-influential programming language and environment that introduced the term "object-oriented programming" and was the ancestor of modern object-oriented languages."
Funny way to spell Simula.
Re: The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI
#53You know your article was worth writing when my idol, Sir Alan Curtis Kay, Smalltalk inventor, takes the time to comment on it!
Fun note for those who weren't aware: he's been known to post here at HN from time to time as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=alankay1
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DAY!Re: The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
> I'm not as pessimistic as Bret Victor [...] ABriefRant I'd actually go one step further than that "rant". In the real world, small physical motions usually have little control significance. Mouse movement and keyboards are among the many exceptions. With XR's hand tracking, that can change. For example, while gaming is focused on "feeling like it's real", so game hands overlap real hands, for getting work done, it'…
> Eye tracking as well. "Look; point; click" has a seemingly redundant step.
> When someone is watching an education video, say IBM's atom animation, you want to both be able to field common questions like "What are the ripples?", but also notice that they are looking at the ripples, and volunteer related content.
This is why I think the gaze tracking in the Windows MR platform (which lights up, quite literally in Fluent design applications, in the just released FCU) is more important than people yet realize. It's been a part of HoloLens demos from the beginning, but it's interesting how many people haven't noticed yet.
Re: The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Meanwhile I find those multi-column views infuriatingly wasteful. I KNOW I'm in folder A/B/C because I literally just clicked them. I prefer being able to use a smaller explorer window that shows more info. One key to this is a mouse with a fourth and fifth button, which windows intuitively maps to "forward" and "back", and mac unhelpfully maps to "nothing" and "expose" and doesn't seem to have useful alternatives built in.
Having back and forward buttons on my thumb, with Window's "Folders come first" list sorting makes folder spelunking much simpler for me
Re: The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI
#56Earlier 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"
Ok I found what I was talking about:
Re: The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI
#57An easy way to try ST-72 is in your browser here: https://lively-web.org/users/Dan/ALTO-Smalltalk-72.html and ST-78 here: https://lively-web.org/users/bert/Smalltalk-78.html The above links run emulators in Javascript and have been used for live demos as well (see https://youtu.be/AnrlSqtpOkw?t=2m29s for a fun one) Related, for a Javascript based live system check out https://www.lively-kernel.org/ (also created by D…
Thanks for posting the links. The Lively project evolved over time: - https://www.lively-kernel.org is from the Sun Labs / HPI days (check out the ancient http://sunlabs-kernel.lively-web.org , fully SVG based rendering :D) - Lively Web: https://lively-web.org A live, programmable wiki (2012-2015) - Since 2016 we are working on lively.next: https://lively-next.org . lively.next will focus more on the "personal enviro…
Ah, thanks for explaining that. I was always a little confused about the relationship between these projects.
Re: The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 coup…
Thank you for the historical info, and the video; as a big computing history buff, I really appreciate both the first-hand account and the media of the time!
I'm always happy to help. I get a great deal from HN, lots of things to learn and smart people to answer questions. It makes me happy when I'm able to give a return contribution.
If, for some reason, you have further questions, uninvolved@outlook.com is the email address that I hand out in public. I tend to write long posts and replies, so you have been officially warned.