Smalltalk Reports

For many years in the early to mid 1990s Smalltalk seemed destined to become the enterprise application programming language. IBM was behind it. Many enterprises were successfully implementing projects in finance, insurance, healthcare, and elsewhere. (Aside: Martin Fowler pointed out recently at the JAOO, Smalltalk and Gemstone still appears to be a more technically facile approach to enterprise development than, say, Java or C# frameworks. But enough of that here.) A healthy and knowledgable consulting community was growing.

On to the point... during Smalltalk's relative heyday (so far), the Smalltalk Report was an indispensable journal of monthly knowledge. A lot of that experience is just fun reading now, but some of it makes up a body of knowledge ("early" writing on patterns and agile methods for example) for programmers today that are more likely than not to be using some other language and tools. (Although if you read the right blogs you get the sense of a mild-to-vibrant Smalltalk resurgence.)

Now really on to the point.... the Smalltalk Journal is now on-line. Note that the initial PDFs on the page are the tables of contents. But the PDFs TOCs are linked to the PDFs for the actual articles. You have to click through in Acrobat reader or viewer that supports PDF hypertext links. (From James' blog.)

IM in the Enterprise: Why?

Phil writes about IM in the enterprise.

I've not been able to determine the advantage of IM over email in the enterprise. More than 9 times out of ten, email performs as quickly as IM, and more than 9 times out of ten the message I want to send can be treated asynchrnously anyway.

What's the critical scenario for the IM argument over email? The conversation is taking place at Phil's blog.

Remember the Momenta? Remember Dynabook?

From Scoble, via James, comes the question of who innovated the tablet PC. (Depends on what the meaning of "is" is, probably. 8*)

Certainly the idea goes back at least to Alan Kay's Dynabook in the 1960s.

Going back 12 years (oh---my---god) we will find the Momenta product, a Smalltalk-based tablet PC (1991, mind you) that was a little ahead of its time (and from a horribly mismanaged start-up as I recall).