Re:Fabrik – A Visual Programming Environment (1988)
by DonHopkins on Wednesday November 03, 2021 @10:51AM
(#29095484)
I asked Dan what he'd been up to recently, and pointed out a wonderfully well written 1994 Roanoke Times article about Dan Ingals that interviewed several extremely interesting people about him, including Alan Kay, Tom Stambaugh, Ivan Sutherland, Peter Deutsch, John Sculley, and Michael Scott.
We discussed some stuff his work inspired that I did with Kaleida Labs ScriptX called "DreamScape". He replied with some really interesting comments and links, including a video of some Programming by Demonstration / Programming by Example work that one his brilliant interns did.
It was nice to see a local newspaper do such extensive research and interviews for a "Local Boy Makes Good" article, and actually get all the facts and names and credits right:
>Roanoke Times, August 14, 1994, A PIONEER'S RETURN TO THE HOMESTEAD
>DAN INGALLS was a computer pioneer in Silicon Valley who helped invent the personal computer as we know it today. Then he gave it all up to run the family hotel in Bath County. Ever heard of The Homestead?
>Kay headed the research team at the famous Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the mid-1970s that made most of the technological breakthroughs that led to the modern personal computer - and Ingalls "was one of the seminal figures" in his lab, Kay says.
>"Science has a better way of allocating credit than journalism does," he says. "Journalists are extremely attracted to the single-inventor theory. In the journalism world, I am often credited as the inventor of almost everything to do with the PC, which is not true."
>To hear Kay tell it, Ingalls was the engineer who did the most important work.
>"If Dan hadn't built them, Steven Jobs would never have seen any kind of demonstration and the MacIntosh would never have been built," Kay says.
>"I'd say Dan is one of fewer than 10, maybe fewer than five, founding fathers of what we know as the personal computer today," says Tom Stambaugh, a software engineer in Massachusetts who is familiar with Ingalls' work. "Children two centuries from now will recognize his name the way we recognize Galileo or Leonardo da Vinci. He really is in that category."
>"In that group, he was one of the technological leaders," says Peter Deutsch, a former colleague from the Xerox days who now heads his own software company in Menlo Park, Calif. "It was really Alan first and then Dan and I don't know who it would be after Dan."
>The key to Xerox's breakthrough in personal computers was "a technological burst," says Bert Sutherland, then Kay's boss and now head of the Sun Microsystems' lab in Mountain View, Calif. "And Dan did the hard-core nitty-gritty coding that made it all work."
>Former colleagues recall his intuitiveness. "One of the things I always admired about Dan was he could just look at a problem and do it," says Adele Goldberg, now chairman of ParcPlace Systems in Sunnyvale, Calif. She recalls that Ingalls once designed a computer program that could scan Sanskrit and reproduce the letters of the Indian language on the screen - an astonishing innovation in the 1970s when scientists were having enough trouble getting computers to work in English.
>Yet, Smalltalk, [Michael] Scott says, has been "incredibly influential" on the evolution of other programming languages. Indeed, it's such "object-oriented" programming that enabled the other computer breakthroughs developed in the Xerox labs to work as easily as they do. "All the graphical interfaces today began with Dan's work," Stambaugh says. "None of that would have happened without Dan."
>Not that Ingalls has profited from this; much of the work at the Xerox labs never was patented, a corporate omission now generally regarded as a phenomenal error. "If I got a penny for every pull-down menu," he observes, "I'd be a rich man."
>"He was a wizard," Sutherland says. "He could sit down at a keyboard and make it do magnificent things. I didn't think he'd give it up to go back and run a hotel. It was quite mind-boggling. He was that rare a talent."
>"It's like removing one of the bright stars from the firmament," Kay says. "He's irreplaceable."
>Apple's chairman at the time, John Sculley, tried to talk Ingalls into staying. "Don't do that," he implored. "We'll find somebody to run The Homestead for you."
>Ingalls is returning to the computer field just as many of his original ideas are emerging triumphant. The "object-oriented programming" he worked on is now elbowing the old-style computer languages out of the market. "It is the future of computer programming," says Scott, the University of Rochester computer scientist.
Don:
>I just ran across this beautiful well researched local newspaper story about you, which interviewed some amazing people!
>I'd love to hear about what you've been up to these days!
>Are you still working on Lively? ;)
>I’m re-watching your Lively talk — it’s delightful, I really love it!
>It reminds me of what I was trying accomplish with ScriptX DreamScape: that drag-and-drop-editing-of-trees-of-live-animated-graphics-that-plug-together in my “Dreamscape” demo for the ScriptX programming language.
>Of course it didn’t have anything like the dynamic scripting and prototyping ability of Lively, but it was inspired by Smalltalk and ThingLab and other great stuff like that.
>ScriptX was developed by Kaleida Labs, a joint venture of Apple and IBM. It was a lot like Dylan or Scheme, with a more c-like syntax, and a CLOS-like generic based / multiple dispatch object system (OIC: Objects in C), and a nice rich multimedia class library).
>ScriptX could import Director sprite bitmap animations and registration points, and package them along with cross platform ScriptX byte code classes in “title containers", that you could download and plug together.
>DreamScape was meant to demonstrate how interactive web sites could be collections of objects and spaces and maps, that you could export as static html+gif web sites, or preview live and browse through dynamic web servers as dynamically generated html+gif, and link into live simulations running on the server, and ultimately download the media and code to run locally in your own ScriptX interpreter.
>There’s a video of the WWDC talk, and I wrote up a transcript with screen snapshots that’s easier to skim, too!
>1995 Apple World Wide Developers Conference Kaleida Labs ScriptX DreamScape Demo
>I watched your DreamScape video - really nice stuff. In the process I realize that I missed a big opportunity with Squeak. One of the things you showed was generating web page content from inside of ScriptX. It was just a year later that we put out Squeak, and we were interested that more people were downloading Squeak to get its tiny wiki server than to run Smalltalk. It was free and cross platform so that was ideal.
>But we could have made the leap right there to a web-borne system like Lively but in Smalltalk and a decade sooner. Avi Bryant’s Seaside came along around 2002 but, again, it wasn’t really a web-borne Smalltalk so much as a Squeak-based web app development system.
>What am I up to? It’s sort of a melange of picking up loose ends from times past and keeping some income going for times to come. Most recently I wrote a long piece for HOPL-2020,
>I was having fun with this just when the funder (Infosys) pulled the plug on our project (HARC) at Y Combinator Research.
>I felt that, by creating programming tiles from concrete actions, it completed the whole concrete programming approach in a nice way. Here’s a link to a simple example by one of my interns (we had JUST got it to work):
We discussed some stuff his work inspired that I did with Kaleida Labs ScriptX called "DreamScape". He replied with some really interesting comments and links, including a video of some Programming by Demonstration / Programming by Example work that one his brilliant interns did.
It was nice to see a local newspaper do such extensive research and interviews for a "Local Boy Makes Good" article, and actually get all the facts and names and credits right:
https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/VA-news/ROA-Times/issues/1994/rt9...
>Roanoke Times, August 14, 1994, A PIONEER'S RETURN TO THE HOMESTEAD
>DAN INGALLS was a computer pioneer in Silicon Valley who helped invent the personal computer as we know it today. Then he gave it all up to run the family hotel in Bath County. Ever heard of The Homestead?
>Kay headed the research team at the famous Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the mid-1970s that made most of the technological breakthroughs that led to the modern personal computer - and Ingalls "was one of the seminal figures" in his lab, Kay says.
>"Science has a better way of allocating credit than journalism does," he says. "Journalists are extremely attracted to the single-inventor theory. In the journalism world, I am often credited as the inventor of almost everything to do with the PC, which is not true."
>To hear Kay tell it, Ingalls was the engineer who did the most important work.
>"If Dan hadn't built them, Steven Jobs would never have seen any kind of demonstration and the MacIntosh would never have been built," Kay says.
>"I'd say Dan is one of fewer than 10, maybe fewer than five, founding fathers of what we know as the personal computer today," says Tom Stambaugh, a software engineer in Massachusetts who is familiar with Ingalls' work. "Children two centuries from now will recognize his name the way we recognize Galileo or Leonardo da Vinci. He really is in that category."
>"In that group, he was one of the technological leaders," says Peter Deutsch, a former colleague from the Xerox days who now heads his own software company in Menlo Park, Calif. "It was really Alan first and then Dan and I don't know who it would be after Dan."
>The key to Xerox's breakthrough in personal computers was "a technological burst," says Bert Sutherland, then Kay's boss and now head of the Sun Microsystems' lab in Mountain View, Calif. "And Dan did the hard-core nitty-gritty coding that made it all work."
>Former colleagues recall his intuitiveness. "One of the things I always admired about Dan was he could just look at a problem and do it," says Adele Goldberg, now chairman of ParcPlace Systems in Sunnyvale, Calif. She recalls that Ingalls once designed a computer program that could scan Sanskrit and reproduce the letters of the Indian language on the screen - an astonishing innovation in the 1970s when scientists were having enough trouble getting computers to work in English.
>Yet, Smalltalk, [Michael] Scott says, has been "incredibly influential" on the evolution of other programming languages. Indeed, it's such "object-oriented" programming that enabled the other computer breakthroughs developed in the Xerox labs to work as easily as they do. "All the graphical interfaces today began with Dan's work," Stambaugh says. "None of that would have happened without Dan."
>Not that Ingalls has profited from this; much of the work at the Xerox labs never was patented, a corporate omission now generally regarded as a phenomenal error. "If I got a penny for every pull-down menu," he observes, "I'd be a rich man."
>"He was a wizard," Sutherland says. "He could sit down at a keyboard and make it do magnificent things. I didn't think he'd give it up to go back and run a hotel. It was quite mind-boggling. He was that rare a talent."
>"It's like removing one of the bright stars from the firmament," Kay says. "He's irreplaceable."
>Apple's chairman at the time, John Sculley, tried to talk Ingalls into staying. "Don't do that," he implored. "We'll find somebody to run The Homestead for you."
>Ingalls is returning to the computer field just as many of his original ideas are emerging triumphant. The "object-oriented programming" he worked on is now elbowing the old-style computer languages out of the market. "It is the future of computer programming," says Scott, the University of Rochester computer scientist.
Don:
>I just ran across this beautiful well researched local newspaper story about you, which interviewed some amazing people!
https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/VA-news/ROA-Times/issues/1994/rt9...
>I'd love to hear about what you've been up to these days!
>Are you still working on Lively? ;)
>I’m re-watching your Lively talk — it’s delightful, I really love it!
>It reminds me of what I was trying accomplish with ScriptX DreamScape: that drag-and-drop-editing-of-trees-of-live-animated-graphics-that-plug-together in my “Dreamscape” demo for the ScriptX programming language.
>Of course it didn’t have anything like the dynamic scripting and prototyping ability of Lively, but it was inspired by Smalltalk and ThingLab and other great stuff like that.
>ScriptX was developed by Kaleida Labs, a joint venture of Apple and IBM. It was a lot like Dylan or Scheme, with a more c-like syntax, and a CLOS-like generic based / multiple dispatch object system (OIC: Objects in C), and a nice rich multimedia class library).
>ScriptX could import Director sprite bitmap animations and registration points, and package them along with cross platform ScriptX byte code classes in “title containers", that you could download and plug together.
>DreamScape was meant to demonstrate how interactive web sites could be collections of objects and spaces and maps, that you could export as static html+gif web sites, or preview live and browse through dynamic web servers as dynamically generated html+gif, and link into live simulations running on the server, and ultimately download the media and code to run locally in your own ScriptX interpreter.
>There’s a video of the WWDC talk, and I wrote up a transcript with screen snapshots that’s easier to skim, too!
>1995 Apple World Wide Developers Conference Kaleida Labs ScriptX DreamScape Demo
>Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NytloOy7WM&feature=emb_logo...
>Illustrated Transcript:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/1995-apple-world-wide-develope...
Dan:
>I watched your DreamScape video - really nice stuff. In the process I realize that I missed a big opportunity with Squeak. One of the things you showed was generating web page content from inside of ScriptX. It was just a year later that we put out Squeak, and we were interested that more people were downloading Squeak to get its tiny wiki server than to run Smalltalk. It was free and cross platform so that was ideal.
>But we could have made the leap right there to a web-borne system like Lively but in Smalltalk and a decade sooner. Avi Bryant’s Seaside came along around 2002 but, again, it wasn’t really a web-borne Smalltalk so much as a Squeak-based web app development system.
>What am I up to? It’s sort of a melange of picking up loose ends from times past and keeping some income going for times to come. Most recently I wrote a long piece for HOPL-2020,
https://smalltalkzoo.thechm.org/papers/EvolutionOfSmalltalk....
>built the beginnings of an online “Smalltalk Zoo”
https://smalltalkzoo.thechm.org/
>started a Smalltalk meetup
https://www.meetup.com/california-smalltalkers/
>I was having fun with this just when the funder (Infosys) pulled the plug on our project (HARC) at Y Combinator Research.
>I felt that, by creating programming tiles from concrete actions, it completed the whole concrete programming approach in a nice way. Here’s a link to a simple example by one of my interns (we had JUST got it to work):
https://lively-next.org/users/robert/ProgrammingByExample_sh...