alan kay: "... I needed a group because I had finally realized that I did not have all of the temperaments required to completely finish an idea. I called it the Learning Research Group (LRG) to be as vague as possible about our charter. I only hired people that got stars in their eyes when they heard about the notebook computer idea ...."

and i can imagen how adele goldberg had that "stars in her eyes" and she was at stanford: at the right place at the right time. adele goldberg: "the story of my life is an accident." well, but she did a lot to make things happen :))

from the famous dave thomas a story about smalltalk: travels with smalltalk .

During 1987-1989 we had the opportunity to work with Digitalk to develop ST/V Mac using machines loaned to us from Alan Kay. Few realized that Alan dreamed of a new generation Macintosh to support his ambitious Vivarium project, hence the "V". Smalltalk/V Mac was the first Smalltalk to support the look and feel of the Mac. When it was first shown at OOPSLA '88, the Mac look was completely emulated-- much to the surprise and upset of some Mac aficionados. While Apple canceled its ST effort, and encouraged its early developers to move to ST/V, Apple failed to put the momentum behind Smalltalk and lost its leadership position in interactive programming tools.

you can find nearly everyone in that little text who was/is involved in different smalltalk groups.

personally i was just trying to get confirmation on a story adele goldberg told, starting with the sentence: i tell you a story, and i don´t know if i have ever told anyone" (if you hear something like this, your neurons are motivated, claro :)). with the following paragraph i would say it is confirmed.

XSIS and The Customer Information Analyst Why would Xerox develop an incredible spreadsheet that could display images, conjugate Russian verbs and why did that happen in a strange group called XSIS located in Los Angeles and Washington? Apparently they had an important customer with a lot of complex information to analyze. How did Angela Coppola know that 1000 people would show up for OOPSLA'86 when the PC committee predicted 100-200? What sort of technology could the National Security Administration use to print Chinese leaflets circa 1978? The Xerox Analyst served the CIA as a analytic tool for many years. Even 13 years later it still offers tools more powerful than MSOffice. The Analyst is still alive and well and forms a key component in TI ControlWorks Wafer Fab Automation System.

and some more ...

well, i would have never been as fast as brian, by copying the smalltalk-72 instruction manual :)) muchas gracias!!! actually those pictures are out of a movie, but still have to find a way how to put it online here, claro, if it is ok with you brian?

some materials that brian brought to erfurt, can be found on the net: the article of daniel ingalls about smalltalk-76. i couldn´t find the presenting paper of rosetta smalltalk, but for the history: in the 70s the manual for smalltalk-72 was already out of print. scott warren and dennis abbe got finally the paper of ingalls (s.a) in their hand. also around ´78 articles of adele goldberg and alan kay appeared in "ieee - computer" and in "scientific american"."the threads we picked up from these documents hinted at the foundation of smalltalk ... while the work of the parc learning research group provided our inspiration, the rosetta smalltalk language is our own." alan kay named it 20 years later an excellend redesign of smalltalk-72.

"one of the major goals of rosetta smalltalk is to provide a medium for spontaneous problem solving. while the injunction "think first, program later" is good advice when engineering a software product, it amounts to a straitjacket for the conversational user."

btw 1972 was not just a year when smalltalk got designed, it was also at that time, that plankalkül was at least published for the first time.