Smalltalk (was: Desktop Metaphor)

Josh Dersch wrote on Tue, 23 Oct 2018 07:25:41 -0700 One complication is that the meaning of terms change over time. I am typing this in Smalltalk (Celeste email app in Squeak 4.1) and it doesn't use icons. Smalltalk-72 had a read-eval-print interface but many applications written in it experimented with different GUI ideas. There were tests for the overlapping windows that Alan Kay described as "like papers on a messy desktop". This got filtered into "Smalltalk had a desktop metaphor" but that is confusing since by the time Star came out the term meant something that was a step in the direction of Microsoft Bob or Magic Cap. Some Smalltalk applications used icons in the sense of the MacPaint tool bar. In fact, the term "icon" was invented by David C. Smith for his 1975 thesis: http://worrydream.com/refs/Smith%20-%20Pygmalion.pdf This had icons, though these were used in an environment more like Scratch than a desktop (it didn't have windows, for example, and the icons were related to the various application domains rather than operating system functions). But given the role David played in the development of the Star, I would call this a part of the future desktop metaphor. Smalltalk-76 got overlapping windows and popup menus as part of its basic system and the command line got replaced with a select text and execute or print scheme, later used in Oberon as well.The windows had title tabs (like later used in BeOS) and they could be collapsed to just the tab or expanded into the full window. Not quite icons on a desktop, but not too different either. I don't know if Smalltalk-76 had multiple projects (desktops) but -78 certainly had them. When seen from another project they were a small window with a tiny view of the project and any windows it had. Those looked a lot like icons, though they were literal representations and not symbolic ones. See figure 11 in: https://freudenbergs.de/bert/publications/Ingalls-2014-Smalltalk78.pdf By the way, in the posts about the improvements from PARC to Apple there was no mention of drag-n-drop, which to me was the most important difference in practice. My conclusion: Smalltalk didn't (and still doesn't) have a desktop metaphor but was a key element in its creation. -- Jecel