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."
I was the chair for Demonstrations at OOPSLA'88 and Dan gave a demo of Fabrik as well as presenting the paper.
I remember being completely astounded at the demo, a packed room, and other peers gasped and wow'ed during the presentation - I agree that Dan Ingalls, soft-spoken and humble, is truly an unsung HERO of many many ideas and innovations, some that stuck, and some that were stepping-stones..
As an aside, also at OOPSLA and in the same soft-spoken and humble way, Trygve Reenskaug, inventor of Model-View-Controller paradigm gave a demo of "SI" a manufacturing oriented project management - I was a manufacturing guy doing Machine Shop automation in Objective-C and was validated and affirmed that others were solving practical problems in the real world while doing invention and innovation practically, instead of all the ivory tower types just cranking out papers.
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[ 8.3 ms ] story [ 78.7 ms ] threadWe 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."
...
Onw of our porfessors in high school was very fond of it.
[0] https://unity.com/sites/default/files/styles/810_scale_width...
I remember being completely astounded at the demo, a packed room, and other peers gasped and wow'ed during the presentation - I agree that Dan Ingalls, soft-spoken and humble, is truly an unsung HERO of many many ideas and innovations, some that stuck, and some that were stepping-stones..
As an aside, also at OOPSLA and in the same soft-spoken and humble way, Trygve Reenskaug, inventor of Model-View-Controller paradigm gave a demo of "SI" a manufacturing oriented project management - I was a manufacturing guy doing Machine Shop automation in Objective-C and was validated and affirmed that others were solving practical problems in the real world while doing invention and innovation practically, instead of all the ivory tower types just cranking out papers.
Telefunken Rollkugelsteuerung was a little bit earlier, as an optional accessory to one of their vector graphics terminals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_mouse
[1] https://squeak.js.org/ and
[2] https://github.com/codefrau/SqueakJS which seems to be able to not only run Squeak, but also
[3] https://github.com/Cuis-Smalltalk/Cuis-Smalltalk-Dev/wiki/Ru...
and
[4] https://github.com/carolahp/pharo to shrink and adapt these images to be able to run on common JS-runtimes in acceptable speeds and memory usage.
There is also
[5] https://caffeine.js.org/ and
[6] https://github.com/ErikOnBike/CodeParadise
bidirectionally <=> bridging the gap between Smalltalk and JS even more, with
[7] https://www.webcomponents.org/
I think it should be possible to port, maybe to even have some hypercard-like visual website builder/explorable explanations thing.