My encounter with Medley Interlisp
Warren Teitelman wrote about the history of Interlisp-D and other window systems in 1985, in the chapter &quot;Ten Years of Window Systems - A Retrospective View&quot; of the book &quot;Methodology of Window Management&quot; (the volume is a record of the Workshop on Window Management held at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory&#x27;s Cosener&#x27;s House between 29 April and 1 May 1985).<p>Warren was the manager of Sun&#x27;s Multimedia Group in which I worked on NeWS, and his contributions to programming environments and user interface design at Xerox PARC were important and underrated.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Warren_Teitelman" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Warren_Teitelman</a><p>&gt;Warren Teitelman (1941 – August 12, 2013) was an American computer scientist known for his work on programming environments and the invention and first implementation of concepts including Undo &#x2F; Redo,[5] spelling correction, advising, online help, and DWIM (Do What I Mean).<p>Ten Years of Window Systems - A Retrospective View, by Warren Teitelman:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chilton-computing.org.uk&#x2F;inf&#x2F;literature&#x2F;books&#x2F;wm&#x2F;p004.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chilton-computing.org.uk&#x2F;inf&#x2F;literature&#x2F;books&#x2F;wm&#x2F;...</a><p>&gt;4.1 INTRODUCTION<p>&gt;Both James Gosling and I currently work for SUN and the reason for my wanting to talk before he does is that I am talking about the past and James is talking about the future. I have been connected with eight window systems as a user, or as an implementer, or by being in the same building! I have been asked to give a historical view and my talk looks at window systems over ten years and features: the Smalltalk, DLisp (Interlisp), Interlisp-D, Tajo (Mesa Development Environment), Docs (Cedar), Viewers (Cedar), SunWindows and SunDew systems.<p>&gt;The talk focuses on key ideas, where they came from, how they are connected and how they evolved. Firstly, I make the disclaimer that these are my personal recollections and there are bound to be some mistakes although I did spend some time talking to people on the telephone about when things did happen.<p>&gt;The first system of interest is Smalltalk from Xerox PARC.<p>Alan Kay commented in email on that paper and Warren&#x27;s under-appreciated work:<p>&gt;Windows didn’t start with Smalltalk. The first <i>real</i> windowing system I know of was ca 1962, in Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad (as with so many other firsts). The logical “paper” was about 1&#x2F;3 mile on a side and the system clipped, zoomed, and panned in real time. Almost the same year — and using much of the same code — “Sketchpad III” had 4 windows showing front, side, top, and 3D view of the object being made. These two systems set up the way of thinking about windows in the ARPA research community. One of the big goals from the start was to include the ability to do multiple views of the same objects, and to edit them from any view, etc.<p>&gt;When Ivan went ca 1967 to Harvard to start on the first VR system, he and Bob Sproull wrote a paper about the general uses of windows for most things, including 3D. This paper included Danny Cohen’s “mid-point algorithm” for fast clipping of vectors. The scheme in the paper had much of what later was called “Models-Views-and-Controllers” in my group at Parc. A view in the Sutherland-Sproull scheme had two ends (like a telescope). One end looked at the virtual world, and the other end was mapped to the screen. It is fun to note that the rectangle on the screen was called a “viewport” and the other end in the virtual world was called “the window”. (This got changed at Parc, via some confusions demoing to Xerox execs).<p>&gt;In 1967, Ed Cheadle and I were doing “The Flex Machine”, a desktop personal computer that also had multiple windows (and Cheadle independently developed the mid-point algorithm for this) — our viewing scheme was a bit simpler.<p>&gt;The first few paragraphs of Teitelman’s “history” are quite wrong (however, he was a good guy, and never got the recognition he deserved for the PILOT system he did at MIT with many of these ideas winding up in Interlisp).<p>David Rosenthal (who worked on Andrew, NeWS, X10, X11, and ICCCM) replied:<p>Alan, thank you for these important details. I’d like to write a blog post correcting my view of this history — may I quote your e-mail?<p>Is this paper, “A Clipping Divider”:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dl.acm.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.1145&#x2F;1476589.1476687" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dl.acm.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.1145&#x2F;1476589.1476687</a><p>The one you refer to?<p>David.<p>Alan Kay replied:<p>Hi David<p>Thanks very much! Your blog is a real addition to the history and context needed to really understand and criticize and improve today.<p>I would like to encourage you to expand it a bit more (even though you do give quite a few references).<p>I had very high hopes for Sun. After Parc, I wanted something better than Smalltalk, and thought Sun had a good chance to do the “next great thing” in all of these directions. And I think a number of real advances were made despite the “low-pass filters” and exigencies of business.<p>So please do write some more.<p>Cheers and best wishes to all<p>Alan<p>Don Hopkins replied:<p>Yeah, it was very sad that Sun ended up in Larry Ellison’s grubby hands. And I sure liked the Sun logo designed by Vaughan Pratt and tilted 45 degrees by John Gage (almost as great as Scott Kim’s design of the SGI logo), which he just sent out to the garbage dump. (At least Facebook kept the Sun logo on the back of their sign as a warning to their developers.)<p>I truly believe that in some other alternate dimension, there is a Flying Logo Heaven where the souls of dead flying logos go, where they dramatically promenade and swoop and spin around each other in pomp and pageantry to bombastic theme music, reliving their glory days on the trade show floors and promotional videos.<p>It would make a great screen saver, at least!<p>-Don<p>David Rosenthal posted on his blog:<p>History of Window Systems<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.dshr.org&#x2F;2021&#x2F;03&#x2F;history-of-window-systems.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.dshr.org&#x2F;2021&#x2F;03&#x2F;history-of-window-systems.html</a><p>&gt;Alan Kay&#x27;s Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers? makes important points about the architecture of the infrastructure for user interfaces, but also sparked comments and an email exchange that clarified the early history of window systems. This is something I&#x27;ve wrtten about previously, so below the fold I go into considerable detail.<p>I archived a discussion that started with Alan&#x27;s reply to the question &quot;Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers?&quot;:<p>Alan Kay on “Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers?” and a discussion of Smalltalk, NeWS and HyperCard<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;donhopkins.medium.com&#x2F;alan-kay-on-should-web-browsers-have-stuck-to-being-document-viewers-and-a-discussion-of-news-5cb92c7b3445" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;donhopkins.medium.com&#x2F;alan-kay-on-should-web-browser...</a><p>&gt;Alan Kay answered: “Actually quite the opposite, if “document” means an imitation of old static text media (and later including pictures, and audio and video recordings).”