@Alan - true if one takes a very broad view of machines as transformers of energy. From that perspective all organic things and many larger inorganic(oceans, planets, stars etc.) bodies are clearly machines as well. Even bits, being made up of the same real physical stuff as humans, are machines - science and religion may have more in common than either likes to admit In any case I’m all for expanding the narrower, industrial-era view of machines as long as we keep strictly biological humans in the loop

I can see that ST companies might have missed an opportunity, but Sun was a BIG presence in the dot-com era and was in a position to effectively support and promote Java (including adding networking).

It seems to me that the next major opportunity, and maybe a more serious failing by ST companies, was web development tools/framework as captured by Ruby/Rails. We are only now seeing effective commercial offerings like GLASS from Gemstone.

Clearly successful business models can be based on open source software. Commercial ST vendors don’t seem to have fully embraced the potential of that business model. This is unfortunate because part of what OSS-commercial vendors sell is access to innovation and ST is a great environment for innovation.

In addition to providing better tools for professionals, commercial ST vendors could help to promote ST/Squeak as an educational platform for kids/teens. Funding some kind of educational coordinator/evangelist would be a big help. ST/Squeak already has some traction in this area. Kids can be surprisingly innovative and once they start on traditional programming education with procedural languages it becomes MUCH more difficult to attract them to ST.

There was the big corp pull but Digitalk still had the independents who had bought at $99 - my company happened to be located a few floors up from Digitalk in the early days and I went downstairs and handed Jim Anderson a check - it didn’t feel so corporate then.

“Back in those days “web” and “corporate” were two different things.”
true

“As I understand it, Sun went to ParcPlace to get VW Smalltalk to be the “Oak” language for “Set Top Boxes” and such (remember, this was before Java was targeted at the web. Everyone was all about “Set Top Boxes”.) Apparently PP wanted to license it for more than an arm and a leg, and the rest is history. This is anecdotal but heard from more than one source.”
I’d heard this too and always felt it was at least somewhat accurate

@Before the internet took off, networking was secondary.
True, but there were several commercial Smalltalks that had every opportunity to jump on the bandwagon before Java ever got on the scene.

@It seems to me that ST’s business case is “making the difficult easy, and impossible possible”. The complexity of the solutions that programmers tackle keeps increasing. (Is there a law for this yet?) FORTRAN and COBOL were tools for fast computations and accounting with well defined inputs and outputs. Then C and soon C++/Java took over and allowed more complex systems to be modeled. ST has been head of its time.

If you check my other posts, you’ll see that’s not how it happened. ST did make the business case you mention in the late 80’s early 90’s and had clearly beaten C/C++ mindshare wise before Java ever arrived. IBM had blessed it and during that era $99 was like open source so a growing community of individuals had gathered around Digitalk as well. I agree that the commercial entities should support Squeak and GNU ST better.