> that it was the Star that introduced the desktop metaphor. The Alto had no "desktop", and indeed, almost no elements of the familiar GUI we all know today.

Is this true? There was e.g. Smalltalk which had a desktop before the Star was there, or there was the Cedar system on the Dorado, which also had a desktop, isn't it?

> the design of Smalltalk influenced almost every language that came after it, from Javascript to Python.

I think that's a bit too optimistic. C++ and Java (and in consequence also C#) are descendants of Simula 67, not Smalltalk. Actually even Smalltalk itself starting from 1976 was closer to Simula 67 than the earlier Smalltalk versions, in that there was inheritance and virtual method dispatch. Van Rossum describes in a blog post that he was only vaguely aware of Smalltalk when he developed Python; his major inspirations were C++, CLU, Modula-3 and Lisp. But anyway the article is about the Alto which was a magnificent achievement.