[Tutor] [OT]Good read

[Alan Gauld]

I've just finished the first paper referenced and thought 
I'd share it. It's a fascinating peek into the history of 
programming and computing in general, tracing events from 
the early 60's through to the early '80's and the appearance 
of the Apple Lisa. In particular it looks at the development 
of Smalltalk which has influenced, many languages 
including Pyhon (see, its not totally OT! :-)

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> This isn't quite a book, but it is an excellent read for
> anyone who wants to see how the computers we use today
> evolved... Its a personal history of the development of
> the Smalltalk programming language by its inventor Alan Kay.
> (Published in 1993)
> 
> The link is here, the article is only about 40 pages or so long
> and only the first 10 pages are of general interest, after that
> it gets a bit technical.
> 
> http://www.metaobject.com/papers/Smallhistory.pdf.
> 
> Kay was involved in many of the earliest attempts to produce
> personal computers(and I'm talking 1960's here!) and carried
> that experience thru' to his work with Xerox PARC in the '70's
> It was after seeing Kay's team's results that Steve Jobs went
> off to build a GUI for Apple...
> 
> Its quite remarkable how advanced were the visions of the
> workers back then. And how little we seem to have advanced
> in the intervening 30 years. Although I guess PDAs are actually
> one step further in some aspects than they were aiming for.
> And tablet PCs are very close to the target.
> 
> For a more generalist view of the same thing see Neal Stephenson's
> excellent paper (which is also a real paper book), also linked...
> 
> http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html
> 
> You need to download the zipped PDF file ...
> 
> Alan G.