Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

AlbertCory·

> Smalltalk's killer app was a hyperlinked encyclopedia created by the CIA,

no, it was the aliens on a side trip after they visited Roswell.

Smalltalk didn't have a "killer app."

View on HN

There was one cool app called "The Analyst", used by CIA it is said. I once saw a demo of how to use it something like an expert system. it had a spreadsheet where any cell could be any Smalltalk object . But seems it has fallen by the wayside and was never ported to newer Smalltalk platforms (?)

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/xsis/XSIS_Smalltalk_Produ...

https://comp.lang.smalltalk.narkive.com/hZvXNNyC/xsis-the-an...

"killer app" is a term for something that breaks a technology wide open, like VisiCalc for the PC, or Mosaic / Netscape for the Internet. Do you really want to put The Analyst on that plane?

Smalltalk's never been any more than an intellectual influence, albeit a big one.

I think you are both right. The term "killer app" can be used for something that causes people to buy something else no matter how expensive just to have that first thing. Visicalc for the Apple II, Lotus 123 for the IBM PC and clones (previous apps ran equally well on non clone MSDOS machines), and the web browsers as you mentioned.

Normally it is associated with making something very popular, and in that regard the Analyst certainly wasn't. But it did get a small group to buy absurdly expensive D-machines from Xerox just to run it, though I think it was more than those who bought them to run Lisp:

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/dolphin/1100_Scientific_I...

More about the Analyst from later in its life:

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/xsis/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com