Desktop Metaphor

Josh Dersch derschjo at gmail.com
Mon Oct 22 23:26:43 CDT 2018


On Mon, Oct 22, 2018 at 9:11 PM Mark Green via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:

> The desk top metaphor goes back to at least Doug Englebarts work in the
> 1960s. There were no icons, but the basic metaphor was there.
>
> You need to be careful when you talk about Smalltalk since there were
> several quite different versions of it. The early versions were far more
> interesting and experimental than the later ones. Unfortunately most of the
> existing documentation is on Smalltalk 80 which was an attempt to take the
> language main stream. I do seem to recall that the earlier implementations
> had icons and the full desktop metaphor. They may have been dropped as
> being to radical for the time.
>

This is entirely incorrect.  Earlier versions of Smalltalk investigated a
lot of different ideas, but none of them used a desktop metaphor with (or
without) icons.

- Josh

>
>


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