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Comment by rootbear | Hacker News Reader

When I was a sysadmin at the Naval Research Laboratory in the 80s, I was asked to install Icon, Ralph Griswold’s follow-on language to SNOBOL. I had a little trouble installing it on our Gould minicomputer and mailed in a support request. It was answered by Griswold himself! I felt special! (It was just a Makefile issue, as I recall. This was the era of tar source file distribution. No rpms, no snaps, no debs.)

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> I had a little trouble installing it on our Gould minicomputer and mailed in a support request

Not sure if this means snail mail, but I don't know why I never considered that before email, people used physical mail for things like tech support, heck, maybe submitting patches

Sometimes you'd see a program you wanted in the back pages of pcworld or another one of those huge computer-warehouse type magazines, and you'd have to fill out a little card and mail in a check while trusting that in a month or two it'd arrive.. I got wolf3d, jill of the jungle, and commander keen this way.

I recently found a package from some PCAnywhere-esque software company that mailed me a copy back in the late 90s.

We would physically mail 9-track tapes back and forth all the time. If you wanted, say, the BSD 4.2 Unix distribution, that was more efficient than downloading it over a 56kbps DDS line or some such.

I meant email, which is generally my default meaning for "mail". I could have worded it better...

Oh wow, I learned a little Icon in college as part of a class on different programming paradigms. As soon as I saw the thread title I thought, "That sounds a lot like Icon."

We also covered Scheme, Prolog, and . . . Java. :-) Okay this was the 90s when OO was new, but still maybe they should have gone with something like Smalltalk.

Oh man. Smalltalk has a huge learning curve. Of course, once you master a few dozen concepts you can just crank out the applications.

I once was paid real money to develop in VA Smalltalk. It was a fun language. Dave Ungar and Dan Ingalls said a few things that made me think they planned at one point to add spitbol-esque features to Smalltalk. And Alan Kay once quipped something about wishing he had seen scheme before writing smalltalk grammar.

For better or worse, bits of Smalltalk live on in Java and Ruby and bits of Scheme can be found in JavaScript if you look hard enough. Where did Icon and Spit/Sno-bol wind up? Alas.

Also Objective-C, although they could have done better than @ and[] all over the place.

And .NET/C#, as Java nemesis :)

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