Xerox Smalltalk

I may be pointing out the obvious, but have you read the canonical introductions http://www.amazon.com/Smalltalk-80-The-Language-its-Implementation/dp/02011… http://www.amazon.com/Smalltalk-80-History-Addison-Wesley-computer-science/… http://www.amazon.com/Smalltalk-80-Interactive-Programming-Environment-Addi… http://www.amazon.com/Fumbling-Future-Invented-Personal-Computer/dp/1583482… On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 11:41 AM, Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote: FWIW: Xerox was trying to sell one of my customers 6085s sometime in the late 80s. The salesman claimed, in a smug way, that all the software was written in Mesa, as if that was beyond our capabilities. I said "Great.", and pulled out the ACM ToPLAS issue about it, "We'll want to get the SDK for it as well so we can do a custom integration with our legacy systems." They weren't willing to sell us that. The most they would allow was their scripting language. And that's one of the Fumbling the Future facets. They deep-down believed they were selling information appliances rather than systems to integrate with the rest of the world. We did as much as we could - ported XNS protocols and tools on our Unix machines, wrote output drivers to emulate their word processors (don't ask) - but in the end they would never allow enough openness for us to build a good integration - and we were going to buy about 50 of these systems with associated filers.