Followed by all the languages, those ones influenced as well.
Followed by all the languages, those ones influenced as well.
The article states (and it makes sense) that the PERQ had influence on the modern Mac, the Macs running Mac OS X and later. Since NeXT and then Apple used UNIX on a Mach Kernel, the latter came as a direct influence from CMU.
Influence on the LISA or the early Mac (before Mac OS X)? Not so much..., those were influenced directly from Xerox PARC ideas, people and technology.
Related to PERQ: The SPICE project from CMU, using PERQs, was also developing SPICE Lisp, which was influenced by the LISP stuff from MIT, including an EMACS variant, influenced by the ZWEI editor from the Lisp Machine. SPICE Lisp from the PERQ, evolved into CMU CL and later SBCL.
But the Xerox PARC -> Apple route is broad and is well documented. Steve Jobs got a demo of the secret Xerox stuff in exchange of some Apple stock, including the Smalltalk system (though the Smalltalk team were less then happy about it). He hired Larry Tesler. Apple was also one of the selected companies getting Smalltalk-80 access and ported it to their machines (later the Apple sources were open sourced). Steve was also interested in the office domain, desktop publishing was one of the first applications of the Mac (incl. Postscript, the Laserwriter, Adobe Pagemaker, ...).
the story of smalltalk at apple is fairly complex
apple did also implement smalltalk-80 on the lisa, and there's a screenshot of that in the smalltalk-80 book (01984), but it was apparently never released, even as proprietary software. apple shipped a macintosh smalltalk in august 01985 (according to http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...) but i don't think squeak (the apple smalltalk that eventually became open-source) was derived from it
alan kay didn't join apple until 01984 (the year after jobs hired sculley as ceo), jobs left in september 01985, and squeak wasn't announced until 01996, which is about the time kay left, and i think squeak as a whole departed for disney at that point. jobs came back in 01997, and though he didn't kill squeak, he did kill hypercard, the other main environment for individual computational autonomy. jobs's apple did eventually make squeak open-source—in 02006!
jecel assumpçao in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23392074 explains that the reason for finally open sourcing squeak a decade after the project ended was that olpc (itself fairly locked down, though less so than iphones) demanded it. also, though, he does heavily imply that it descended from the original apple smalltalk
It wasn’t until Tim Cook took over that Macs became more locked-down in terms of user-serviceability and expandability, culminating with the switch to ARM, where Apple sells no Macs with user-upgradable RAM anymore.
Had Apple’s leadership been more focused in the “interregnum” years of 1985-1996, we could be using Dynabooks running some sort of modern Dylan/Common Lisp machine architecture with a refined Macintosh interface. Apple had all the pieces (Newton’s prototype Lisp OS, SK8, Dylan, OpenDoc, etc.), but unfortunately Apple was unfocused (Pink, Copland, etc.) while Microsoft gained a foothold with DOS/Windows. What could’ve been...my dream side project is to make this alternate universe a reality by building what’s essentially a modern Lisp machine.
Actually that ship has sailed. The M1 MacBook Air was a big step up on any prior "user serviceable" Mac. It's portable, fast, extremely efficient, light-weight, robust and totally silent. Upgrading RAM has mostly been a non-issue. The Symbolics Genera emulator on the M1 runs roughly 80 times faster than my hardware Symbolics board in my Mac IIfx. That hardware was fragile and expensive. I'm much happier now, given that this stuff runs much better.
I loved my 2006 MacBook. It was lightweight for the time, and it was remarkably easy to make RAM and storage upgrades. I also enjoyed my 2013 Mac Pro, which I purchased refurbished in 2017. While it didn’t have expansion slots, I did upgrade the RAM during the pandemic from 12GB to 64GB, which was wonderful!
This also applies to Pharo, at least for the initial versions as they forked out of Squeak.
Clascal came to be, because Smalltalk was too demanding for Lisa's hardware.
I don't think there was ever a move to use Smalltalk in Apple Products, anyway. Besides a pre-product version of Apple Smalltalk 80 itself, which was available for a short time.
Eventually also PASCAL (using BEGIN/END) lost at Apple against the curly braces in C/C++/Objective C/Java/JavaScript/Swift.