> In the smalltalk world (and Lisp machine worlds of PARC and MIT) everything running in the machine (above the microcode layer) was inspectable, breakpoint able, and modifiable.
So Linux plus maybe some elegance features?
So Linux plus maybe some elegance features?
But you raise an interesting point: one of the reasons I started Cygnus with John and Michael was that I had never used a machine to which I didn't have access to the source code and the idea of that horrified me.
Including the Mesa and Mesa/Cedar systems also done at Xerox for memory safe systems programming.
https://www.quora.com/What-was-it-like-to-be-at-Xerox-PARC-w...
>Q: What was it like to be at Xerox PARC when Steve Jobs visited?
>A: Alan Kay, Agitator at Viewpoints Research Institute
>[...] The demo itself was fun to watch — basically a tag team of Dan Ingalls and Larry Tesler showing many kinds of things to Steve and the several Apple people he brought with him. One of Steve’s ways to feel in control was to object to things that were actually OK, and he did this a few times — but in each case Dan and Larry were able to make the changes to meet the objections on the fly because Smalltalk was not only the most advanced programming language of its time, it was also live at every level, and no change required more than 1/4 second to take effect.
>One objection was that the text scrolling was line by line and Steve said “Can’t this be smooth?”. In a few seconds Dan made the change. Another more interesting objection was to the complementation of the text that was used (as today) to indicate a selection. Steve said “Can’t that be an outline?”. Standing in the back of the room, I held my breath a bit (this seemed hard to fix on the fly). But again, Dan Ingalls instantly saw a very clever way to do this (by selecting the text as usual, then doing this again with the selection displaced by a few pixels — this left a dark outline around the selection and made the interior clear). Again this was done in a few seconds, and voila!
>The Smalltalk used in this demo was my personal favorite (-78) that was done for the first portable computer (The Parc Notetaker), but also ran on the more powerful Dorado computer. For a fun “Christmas project” in 2014, several of us (with Dan Ingalls and Bert Freudenburg doing the heavy lifting) got a version of this going (it had been saved from a disk pack that Xerox had thrown away).
>I was able to use this rescued version to make all the visuals for a tribute to Ted Nelson without any new capabilities required. The main difference in the tribute is that the revived version had much more RAM to work with, and this allowed more bit-map images to be used. This is on YouTube, and it might be interesting for readers to see what this system could do in 1978–79.
Alan Kay's tribute to Ted Nelson at "Intertwingled" Fest