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It doesn't go down easily the modern OSs we use are either a GUI-based desktop OS that wouldn't be serious and compete with OS/2 with a billion patches applied or some rehash of 70's Unix.

Really... Why is that Smalltalk/80 and Lisp'56 still make Java'2009 seem primitive?

Even the Smalltalk/80 environment makes Windows'2009 look primitive (colorful, translucent and primitive).

2 comments

It's interesting you should say that because I've often considered Smalltalk/80 as the last point we were headed in the right direction.

I've spent a long time (a decade, yikes) with some Ph.D students doing research on the trajectory I think it should have taken.

I just finished reading an og copy of the smalltalk/80 language manual/specification and seriously - how did things go so backward? I bought the book to get a better feel for what sort of object hierarchy to use in my pet language and found far more than that. I wasn't planning on caring about the graphical side of things but even that was insanely cool!