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Alan Kay's tribute to Ted Nelson at "Intertwingled" Festival

TheTedNelson · demo · Watch on YouTube

GUI, HCI & interface historyTech pioneers & interviewsHistory of computing

What it is

Alan Kay's tribute to Ted Nelson at the Intertwingled festival, presented using a revived Smalltalk-78 system running on emulated 1970s Xerox PARC hardware. It shows live, user-programmable software from that era.

Why Hacker News recommends it

HN returns to it again and again as a demonstration of how programmable and composable 1970s systems were compared with today's.

  • 7 people recommended it
  • 10 different months
  • 2 strong recommendations
  • first 2016, last 2025

What HN commenters said

  1. “a great example of what's not-even-close to possible on today's systems”

    Shows what is not-even-close to possible on today's systems

    kennethfriedman, 2017-09 · Strong recommendation · in “Then and Now: How Little Things Have Changed (2016)”

  2. “Look how programmable this is by the user!”

    Alto demo shows user-programmable system beyond modern OSes

    ryukafalz, 2023-03 · Strong recommendation · in “50 Years Later, We’re Still Living in the Xerox Alto’s World”

  3. “If people are interested to see part of what we had in mind”

    Demo of revived 1978 Xerox PARC software

    alankay, 2017-09 · Recommendation · in “Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true”

  4. “alan kay - tribute to ted nelson at intertwingled fest”

    Listed among favorite tech talks

    seltzered_, 2018-04 · Recommendation · in “Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?”

  5. “To get another taste of the kinds of systems possible in the 70s, in spite of the constraints, see Kay's demo”

    Revived Smalltalk-78 system shows what was possible in the 70s

    shalabhc, 2018-09 · Recommendation · in “The Early History Of Smalltalk (1993)”

  6. “Easy, here is some time travel”

    Time travel to an alternate computing world with Smalltalk

    pjmlp, 2021-06 · Recommendation · in “Try APL”

  7. “would be an ideal starting interface for e-ink based tablet”

    Smalltalk-78 as ideal starting interface for e-ink tablets

    infinite8s, 2021-12 · Recommendation · in “PineNote Developer Edition – E-Paper Tablet”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: alan kay, smalltalk-78, ted nelson, xerox parc, malleable software, computer history

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