- It's rather about OpenDoc and OLE/COM. But there was indeed a user interface framework using CORBA, called Fresco, which was a successor of the InterViews user interface framework, and pretty complex and slow. CORBA and DCOM silently vanished when EJBs and .NET became popular.
- That's a nice documentary, thanks for sharing. It's also recommended for all people who still think that graphical user interfaces were invented at Xerox Parc (which is not true of course).
- It all started with Object Pascal and MacApp.
- Thanks for the links.
Here is yet another one: https://github.com/rochus-keller/LisaPascal
- Joyce was an amazing language; it's a concurrent Pascal version which uses (synchronous) communication channels like CSP (instead of monitors as in Brinch Hansen's earlier languages), and it supported indirect naming of channels and recursive processes even before Newsqueak, which eighteen years later became Go.
- Interesting article.
> 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.
- Alas I have never seen one in the flesh. I only read about it from Butler Lampsons interview in “Programmers at Work”
- There are tons of demonstration videos on youtube and also the Computer History Museum has some which still work (not sure whether they are a permanent exhibit). Personally I'm more interested in the software they recently published (see e.g. https://computerhistory.org/press-releases/xerox-alto/)
- Not necessary from my point of view; the list of submissions and comments is good enough.
- And apparently there has been some continuation until 2013, see http://occam-pi.org/
Here are even some github projects with commits until 2020: https://github.com/concurrency
And here is even more interesting stuff: https://web.archive.org/web/20190923093909/http://www.transt.../ and https://web.archive.org/web/20230610081628/http://concurrenc.../
- Wow, that's fascinating, thanks for the hint; just had a look at https://interlisp.org which has a lot of interesting stuff, and there is even an online version which perfectly works with my old Firefox: https://online.interlisp.org/main
- More
Are you planning to extend the compiler into a full Pascal cross compiler for the Lisa? That would be _very_ nice to have...