Desktop Metaphor

[Josh Dersch]

On Tue, Oct 23, 2018 at 7:14 AM Mark Green via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:

> I worked on the early Smalltalk systems, mainly variations of Smalltalk
> 76. They were there. It was the motivation for my MSc thesis which explored
> concurrent message passing for UI implementation including a demo of a
> system based on the desktop metaphor.
>

I've never seen evidence for any Smalltalk having a desktop metaphor (as in
the discussion at hand -- icons and folders representing files and/or data,
not merely windows, etc.).  It's certainly possible that the platform was
used for experimentation with such within PARC or elsewhere, but no
smalltalk images I've seen contain anything like that.  Is your thesis
available to read anywhere?

I wrote an Alto emulator (https://github.com/livingcomputermuseum/ContrAlto)
that you can use to run a variety of Smalltalk versions (-72, -74, -76, and
early renditions of -80 are available on Bitsavers) if you wish to revisit
this.

- Josh