Yes, and surprisingly successful! It's a shame that passed away. Exploratory programming environments had their own "winter" and are only starting to return. That return involves a lot of recapitulation of old hard-earned lessons, because in CS it's considered poor form to read the literature.

I don't know if it is CS to blame, or all the fashion trends that pretend they are showing something that will change the world from a couple of people creating start-ups without having had a solid engineering degree.

One of the reasons I like digital archeology is the way my degree was all about regarding computing evolution subjects, and we had a proper campus library to go along them, e.g. most published Xerox books.

The weirdo "startup culture" that developed in the dot com boom and survives today is just a modern phenomenon. I remember a relatively high level of disregard for the literature even back in the early 80s, more in industrial research labs than academia of course, but even in academia the CS culture was quite different from the other sciences like mathematics or physics. Perhaps it was the engineering influence.

It's peculiar as so much early CS came from people trained as mathematicians.

> I suppose the picture of computing is of a topsy-turvy growth obeying laws of a commercial "natural" selection. This could be entirely accurate considering how fast it has grown. Things started out in a scholarly vein, but the rush of commerce hasn't allowed much time to think where we're going.

(a statement as true in 2023 as it was in 1963?)