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Alto System Project: Dan Ingalls demonstrates Smalltalk

Computer History Museum · 35.9K views · 2019-03-12 · 2:08:02

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Overview

A roughly two-hour demonstration by Dan Ingalls of Smalltalk running on the Computer History Museum's restored Xerox Alto. It shows the integrated environment and language designed at Xerox PARC as personal dynamic media.

On Hacker News

Recommended as a vivid look at live, interactive programming environments and what Xerox PARC built on very limited hardware.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 4 months · HN mentions 2020–2025

Topics

GUI, HCI & interface historyHistory of computingProgramming language design
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smalltalkdan ingallsxerox altolive programmingcomputer history

What people said

peterkelly · 2022-10 · Strong recommendation

Since the talk was already posted yesterday, here's another great related video that is well worth watching: Dan Ingalls demonstrating Smalltalk 76 on a restored Xerox Alto. [VIDEO] This is where it all started and it's truly amazing what they achieved on such limited hardware.

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MaxLeiter · 2022-03 · Recommendation

I’ve been on a Smalltalk binge the last few days and have really been enjoying this two hour long interview / demo with Dan Ingalls on Smalltalk and the Alto: [VIDEO]

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pjmlp · 2021-01 · Recommendation

Be prepared to be amazed with what Xerox PARC and others were doing, while Bell Labs was busy pushing for UNIX. "Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar" [LINK] "Emulating a Xerox Star (8010) Information System Running the Xerox Development Environment (XDE) 5.0" [LINK] "Documents as User Interfaces Video Demo" [LINK] "SYMBOLICS S-PACKAGES 3D GRAPHICS AND ANIMATION DEMO" [LINK] "Alto System Project: Dan Ingalls demonstrates Smalltalk" [VIDEO] "Action!, the worlds first dynamic interface builder - 1988" (Interface Builder percursor, written in Lisp) [LINK] "The Interlisp programming environment" [LINK] And the cherry, how Lucid used Lisp ideas for their Energize C++ IDE, including an image based format for AST storage [LINK] [LINK]

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Sources

Video by Computer History Museum, played through YouTube.

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