Are you familiar with Oberon? ACME is really closer to that than Smalltalk. It’s funny you mentioned both though because I’ve toyed with the idea of making an Oberon/Acme environment in Squeak. I’m quite certain it’s doable with Morphic.
It’s probably not fair to say that we’ve lost a capacity or appreciation for creativity and novel ideas. In sheer volume, there are probably more people doing XeroxPARC level crazy stuff now than then. It just feels like way more investments are made to copy the thing someone else is doing but tweak it slightly than on truly large moonshots.
Part of this is probably the homogenization cause by mass, instant communication, and not forcing you to wonder, how did they do that, and how would I do it differently. It’s a double edged sword though. Hell, I feel like part of the reason some of this stuff didn’t catch fire and spread was because of the limited ability to share and talk with people too.
I don’t know what the right answer is. I just want more cool shit.
I'm not sure about that. From the Computer History Museum's 50th anniversary event of the Alto two days ago, each Alto cost about 18k in early 1970s dollars (about 100k today). And they built hundreds of them. Not sure anyone has the budget to do the level of crazy work that would require the equivalent amount of future computer power today.
The point I was making is that doing the equivalent level of 'crazy' work (for it was crazy, the idea of giving everyone the equivalent of a personal pdp-11 in those days) requires equivalent levels of funding. It's just that most people can't imagine what could be computed on a $100k equivalent of computing today.
For all of us who grew up in the days of personal computing, it's hard to imagine that what they accomplished as being crazy.