The Early History of Smalltalk

Alan C. Kay describes how Smalltalk emerged from 1960s innovations in human-computer interaction, personal computing, and object-oriented design, viewing these developments as a fundamental paradigm shift rather than incremental improvements to existing computing methods. The early versions of Smalltalk (1971-1980) at Xerox PARC represented the first complete realization of revolutionary computing concepts including handheld "Dynabook" devices, learning-oriented user interfaces, and message-passing between protected universal cells. Kay emphasizes that Smalltalk's significance lay in its attempt to fundamentally transform computing beliefs and practices, similar to the invention of the printing press, by taking extreme positions that forced entirely new computing styles to be invented.