[Edu-sig] RE: "Croquet Project" and Python ?

[J Max]

Just watching this discussion of Croquet and Squeak and Alan Kay, and 
thought I'd throw in some perspective -- I'm working on a historical 
study of the whole thing.

Squeak was developed at Apple in 1996, where Alan Kay had been doing 
nearly invisible educational research projects (primarily the Vivarium 
project) for more than a decade. Apple was in very bad shape in 1996, 
and Kay managed to talk higher-ups at Apple to release it with an 
open-source-ish license before leaving Apple (a lot of people left 
Apple at this time). Kay and his team (and Squeak) were courted by Bran 
Ferren at Disney Imagineering, and they were there until 2001, when 
Eisner layed off a few thousand people; most of Imagineering left at 
that point, including Ferren.

After Disney, Kay and team had had enough of corporate homes, so they 
set up the Viewpoints Reseach Institute, a non-profit org that is 
officially behind Squeak. Kay and a few key people are on the payroll 
of HP currently, but Squeak (and Croquet, by extension) is Viewpoints' 
property. The Squeak community has been working hard in the past couple 
of years to clean up the copyright encumbrances of Squeak and its 
license, but this has more to do with leftovers from Apple than 
anything from Disney.

I think the Disney connection is getting a bit overplayed here... 
Squeak is the latest instance in the convoluted history of Smalltalk's 
dual nature: as educational environment and as a 'professional' 
prgramming environment -- a tension that's been there since the early 
1970s. Kay has always been unambiguously on the side of the educational 
vision.

If anyone's interested in the historical pieces, I've collected a lot 
of them at:

   http://thinkubator.ccsp.sfu.ca/Dynabook/

  - John Maxwell
    jmax at sfu.ca