Dealers of Lightning

[Aaron Bonner]

Maybe like some (maybe many) developers who were born in the 80s or 90s, I have very little appreciation for what went on in the formative era of computing. After reading a chapter in Beautiful Architecture on Smalltalk and cross-referencing some of that with what I read in GOOS, then seeing Philip's Beck Smalltalk best practices series of posts, I have been really getting stuck into learning Smalltalk.

In the process my curiosity has been piqued, so much of what was in Smalltalk so long ago seems to have been forgotten - or only recently rediscovered.

So I've been devouring pretty much anything I can get my hands on regarding the origins of Smalltalk. Kay's essay on the Early History of Smalltalk was a great staging post and that (with google's help) led me to a bunch of stuff on the c2 wiki, including a brief entry for the book 'Dealers of Lightning' which looks at the history and impact of Xerox's PARC.

It's been keeping me up late for the past few days. I don't know about the rest of you, but when I am reading a book I truly love, I get pangs of regret, I know the book will end and that will be that. So I'm just curious given this list's wide reading, if anyone knows other books on both the technical and personal history of computing that I really should add to my reading list?

I don't give Dealers another couple of days before I finish it, and I want something to look forward to moving on to :)

Cheers,
Aaron.

[Nat Pryce]

Have you read The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder? That was one
of the books that inspired my interest in computers.

www.natpryce.com

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[Aaron Bonner]

I haven't no. Just added it on amazon!

Thanks,
Aaron.

[Steve Freeman]

more technical:

The Art of the Metaobject Protocol
Software Fundamentals (writings of David Parnas)
and as always, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (although you might find the videos more entertaining)

S.

[Colin Vipurs]

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution-Anniversary/dp/1449388396

Stephen Levy - Hackers
(don't be fooled by the name)

It's a history of the software and hardware pioneers and covers
interesting things on Stallman, Jobs, Wozniak, Gates etc. back from
when they were a helluva lot younger. I think this is the book that
got me on the road of always thinking about doing "The Right Thing".

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--

Maybe she awoke to see the roommate's boyfriend swinging from the
chandelier wearing a boar's head.

Something which you, I, and everyone else would call "Tuesday", of course.

[Rick DeNatale]

On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 6:55 AM, Aaron Bonner <ajbo...@gmail.com> wrote:

Maybe like some (maybe many) developers who were born in the 80s or 90s, I have very little appreciation for what went on in the formative era of computing.

Ah yes, the industry is full of kids these days it seems. <G>

I'm old enough to have lived through those days, and I actually met several of the people in Dealers of Lightning, and even worked with some, either directly or via industry relationships.  I was very involved in the Smalltalk community and pushed IBM to adopt it.  One of my treasured possessions is a copy of a Digitalk Smalltalk/V manual signed by the Digitalk developers and also by Alan Kay, who wrote "to the least IBM-like IBMer I've ever met."

http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/category/smalltalk has some of my reminiscences about Smalltalk.  I haven't written anything for the blog for quite a while but you might find some useful stuff there in general.

John White, who ran Xerox PARC sometime after the DOL book, and was also President of the ACM in the early 1990s was the professor who taught me compiler construction at UConn in the 1970s.

 

After reading a chapter in Beautiful Architecture on Smalltalk and cross-referencing some of that with what I read in GOOS, then seeing Philip's Beck Smalltalk best practices series of posts, I have been really getting stuck into learning Smalltalk.

I'm guessing the Philip is Kent's evil twin.  I wonder if his practices are better than Kent's are <G>. 

In the process my curiosity has been piqued, so much of what was in Smalltalk so long ago seems to have been forgotten - or only recently rediscovered.

So I've been devouring pretty much anything I can get my hands on regarding the origins of Smalltalk. Kay's essay on the Early History of Smalltalk was a great staging post and that (with google's help) led me to a bunch of stuff on the c2 wiki, including a brief entry for the book 'Dealers of Lightning' which looks at the history and impact of Xerox's PARC.

I've got 'bragging rights' as the first logged visitor to Ward's Wiki after he 'opened the doors' in March 1995.

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?VisitorsInNinetyFive 

It's been keeping me up late for the past few days. I don't know about the rest of you, but when I am reading a book I truly love, I get pangs of regret, I know the book will end and that will be that. So I'm just curious given this list's wide reading, if anyone knows other books on both the technical and personal history of computing that I really should add to my reading list?

I don't give Dealers another couple of days before I finish it, and I want something to look forward to moving on to :)

Yes DOL is a fun read. Another similar, and older book is "Fumbling the Future: How Xerox invented and ignored the Personal Computer."

Smalltalk has some powerful ideas about doing computation via messages between 'black box' objects which got diluted as C++ and then Java switched the focus to building hierarchies of implementations of not very black boxes.  I think people are finally starting to rediscover the power of the Smalltalk view of OO programming.

For more Smaltalk resources:

The Smalltalk-80 books are the original 'scriptures'  The original 'Blue' book covered the language and a reference implementation.  It's long out of print, succeeded by the 'Purple' book which omits the implementation chapters. The Green Book "Bits of History, Words of Advice" is quite interesting it is a series of essays by various people at Parc, Apple, Tektronix, UC Berkley (and maybe some others I'm too lazy to look up) who did Smalltalk implementations based on the blue book.

Dave Ungar's doctoral disseration from Berkley "The Design and Evaluation of a High-Performance Smalltalk System" is also interesting if implementation of dynamic languages interests you.  It won the ACM distinguished dissertation award in 1986.  Dave did this work as part of the "Smalltalk on a RISC" done at UC Berkeley under David Patterson.  He went on to invent Self, and even purely encapsulated language, which contributed modern Java implementations of JIT compilation.

Another source of valuable 'history' related to ST is "Responsibility-Driven-Design" which focuses on messages and black-boxes.  Rebecca Wirfs-Brock wrote two books (with different co-authors) first "Designing Object Oriented Software", and later "Object Design: Roles, Responsibilities, and Collaborations"

The Smalltalk Industry Council http://www.stic.st/ had some historical resources as well, but right now it doesn't seem to be working http://www.stic.st/  not sure if that's temporary or permanent.

--
Rick DeNatale

Google+: +Rick DeNatale
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[Steve Freeman]

On 20 Feb 2013, at 13:20, Rick DeNatale wrote:
>> es DOL is a fun read. Another similar, and older book is "Fumbling the
> Future: How Xerox invented and ignored the Personal Computer."

+1 In my time at Xerox, the view appeared to "Previously, we invented the future and gave it away. We're not let that happen again."... The striking thing about both PARC and Agile is that we lose out to the accountants.

> Another source of valuable 'history' related to ST is
> "Responsibility-Driven-Design" which focuses on messages and black-boxes.
> Rebecca Wirfs-Brock wrote two books (with different co-authors) first
> "Designing Object Oriented Software", and later "Object Design: Roles,
> Responsibilities, and Collaborations"

+1 for her Object Design which we always reference.

For variety, I'd also consider reading Betrand Meyer's on OO-Software Construction, and one of the books on Erlang (in many ways closer to Kay's biological metaphor).

S

[Aaron Bonner]

Thanks for the wonderful responses here, especially Rick for taking the time to jot all of that down.

It's fascinating being able to draw a thread back from the tools and technology of today to something for example like Sutherland's Sketchpad. In some respects the more I read about what the Technologists of the past were achieving and the limitations they had to work within, the more I wonder at how comparatively little seems to have been achieved in more recent times. It's hard to understand the context of the time, today though. If there was a modern day equivalent of ARPA helicoptering cash into research departments I wonder if that would help or hinder us.

Anyway… thank you all once more for the links and insights. I feel quite privileged to work in a field with such an fascinating human and technical history.

Cheers,
Aaron.

[Nat Pryce]

Sutherland's PhD thesis is online. It's another great read. It's
amazing what he achieved.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-574.pdf

--Nat

--
http://www.natpryce.com

[Anthony Green]

It's been keeping me up late for the past few days. I don't know about the rest of you, but when I am reading a book I truly love, I get pangs of regret, I know the book will end and that will be that. So I'm just curious given this list's wide reading, if anyone knows other books on both the technical and personal history of computing that I really should add to my reading list?

I'm an glutton for knowledge so my list (inc screencasts, books, blog posts) would be endless, I'll stick to two in the Smalltalk vein:

Object Thinking by David West

Practical Object Orientated Design in Ruby by Sandi Metz

both former Smalltalk programmers.

[Uberto Barbini]

I gasped when I saw "hexagonal pattern" in the index of a paper from 63! :)

It's really worth be be read from start to end.


Uberto

[Philip Schwarz]

Same for me. Such fond memories! Here is the book cover of my copy, which I was given in 1982 or 1983: https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&docid=C7pDabha78weRM&tbnid=WBNxS6F6tLs9mM:&ved=0CAUQjRw&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.flickr.com%2Fphotos%2Fjvk%2F7358105416%2F&ei=mUclUcyLEtGz0QX27oCYDw&bvm=bv.42661473,d.d2k&psig=AFQjCNFXuxFD7u2sqDsi2z-C1CeeDSvkHQ&ust=1361484048943210

[Mike Stockdale]

Me too.

--
Cheers,
Mike Stockdale

fitSharp
Syterra Software Inc.

[philip schwarz]

Hello,

did you attend 'A workshop on Mastery, with Dave West' http://xpday-london.editme.com/XTC20130219 ? I ask because your name is in the list of attendees.

If so, did West say anything at all about his "five books in progress, all of which will be published in 2013"?

Thanks,

Philip

[Steve Freeman]

Yes. I was there. Didn't catch anything about five books, tho'

Sent from a device without a keyboard. Please excuse brevity, errors, and embarrassing autocorrections.