The Early History Of Smalltalk
Summary
Alan Kay's The Early History Of Smalltalk traces the origins of object-oriented programming from Sketchpad and Simula through FLEX and PARC to Smalltalk-71/72/76, highlighting the Learning Research Group's role, the move toward objects and message passing, and the evolution of the Smalltalk UI and educational experiments. The piece provides insight into how hardware constraints, pedagogy, and design philosophy shaped a language family that influenced modern programming and software design.