"I have a mind like a steel... uh... thingy." Patrick Logan's weblog.

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Saturday, September 11, 2004

Wandering About in the Past

I miss the Greater Boston Chapter of the ACM, in particular their in-depth workshops like the one coming up on Parrot.

About twenty years ago, Adele Goldberg was president of the ACM. She gave a talk to the GBC-ACM, and a Saturday before or after someone held one of those all-day Saturday workshops on Smalltalk. That was my first exposure to Smalltalk and circuitously led to the Mainsail programming language being ported to the Data General 32-bit Eclipse CPU.

The Alto was based on the DG Nova, and Data General was one of the first licensees of Smalltalk, but I never saw Smalltalk running on any DG hardware. Mainsail (a "managed runtime" in today's dry terminology) almost became the primary application development language for DG's workstations. Unfortunately C and Unix had captured a lot of imagination in the early 1980s and DG followed that road, ultimately to destruction, as HP did to Apollo.

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About Me

Portland, Oregon, United States
I'm usually writing from my favorite location on the planet, the pacific northwest of the u.s. I write for myself only and unless otherwise specified my posts here should not be taken as representing an official position of my employer. Contact me at my gee mail account, username patrickdlogan.