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Comment by igouy | Hacker News Reader

March 7, 1988 — "Smalltalk/V 286 is available now and costs $199.95, the company said. Registered users of Digitalk's Smalltalk/V can upgrade for $75 until June 1."

https://books.google.com/books?id=CD8EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA25&dq=d...

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I bought that. (We just don't discuss how much money was spent in the 80's and 90's on hardware, books, software, etc.) I had to drive from the So Cal South Bay up to Sherman Oaks to find a store on Ventura Blvd that had it. It was pretty cool at the time, but, it didn't have very good documentation on getting "your first app" up, so it mostly just sat and lingered.

There was a lot of reliance on the Smalltalk books. While the blue book was common, the green (history) and orange (how the GUI works) were not. I don't even recall stumbling across those at OpAmp back in the day (and if anyone would have had those, they would have). I was very excited about ST back in the day.

All of my forays into ST ended up being a struggle and I never got any real momentum to make progress.

Disks and manual were mailed across the pond.

> but, it didn't have very good documentation on getting "your first app" up

I thought the "Smalltalk/V 286 Tutorial and Programming Handbook" [0] was OK for that. (I hadn't seen the ParcPlace books back then.)

[0] http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/SmalltalkVTutorial...

Inflation-adjusted, those prices today would correspond to ~$552.2 and ~$207.6

Look at other 1988 prices for dev tools.

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