Previous | Table of Contents | Next |
3.5.5.4. A Period of Acquisitions
Meanwhile, in Ottawa, Canada, at Carlton College, Dave Thomas, John Pugh, and Wilf LaLonde decided to revolutionize the computer science department by revamping their courses to focus on object technology. Their programming language of choice was Smalltalk because they had designed a new team tool for Smalltalk developers published under the name Orwell (Thomas & Johnson, 1988). By their own report, they were able to make this transition because they were willing to do the detailed curriculum work themselves and because the implications of the decision were not well understood at the time. Pugh and LaLonde formed The Object People, a training and consulting company, and Thomas formed Object Technology, Inc. (OTI), to carry out contract work with the Canadian intelligence community and productize the Orwellian team tool (product named ENVY). Educating Carlton students and then having the first pick for their companies represented smart business practice. OTI built the first real-time embedded Smalltalk systems. Later, OTI worked with Tektronix to create a commercial embedded Smalltalk system for oscilloscopes. OTI also wrote its own virtual machine for the Macintosh, which was the Mac product sold by Digitalk. The relationship between OTI and Digitalk was not always friendly; it grew worse when Jim Anderson (Digitalk chairman and a founder) mishandled the relationship with IBM that Thomas had helped form. IBM used the Digitalk Smalltalk to create a new visual programming interface but found it could not partner well with Digitalk and turned to OTI for more support. OTI created a Smalltalk front end to the IBM AS400 and implemented Smalltalk on IBMs mainframe systems under MVS. IBM then announced Visual Age, which was based on the OTI Smalltalk implementations and was a direct competitor to Digitalks own component-based Parts Workbench. It was no surprise to the Smalltalk community when, in 1995, OTI was acquired by IBM.
On entering the Smalltalk market, IBM set out to create a standard. For the first time since his earlier visit to PARC, Jim Anderson of Digitalk asked to talk with me. He specifically wanted us to team up to drive the standard, essentially not cooperating with IBM. Because PPS had already signed an agreement with IBM to cooperate in setting the standard through proper ANSI channels, we did not respond to Jims proposition. The initial analysis by the IBMers showed that Digitalk would have to make considerable changes, not the least of which was the update to full block closure, which Digitalk had agreed to in 1986 but never carried out.
In 1991 I stepped down as PPS CEO to focus on technical work I had started on object analysis (Rubin & Goldberg, 1992) and project management (Goldberg & Rubin, 1995). The replacement I hired was Bill Lyons. PPS then made a number of ill-considered acquisitions, ignored the successful strategy that built the company to qualify for an IPO, and eventually lost customer and investor confidence. Lyons orchestrated a merger with Digitalk in 1995 (forming ParcPlace-Digitalk, or PPD), and bought ObjectShare and Polymorphic Systems (two firms whose success depended on the success of PPD). The merger and formation of PPD was confusing to the Smalltalk community as the company delayed putting in place a combined technology direction. Adding to the confusion, Jim Anderson, pre-merger chairman of Digitalk, stated publicly that he had lost faith in Smalltalk in the face of the Java juggernaut. Lyons resigned in 1997, and the company was reconstituted under the new name ObjectShare. The apparent winner, because of PPD problems, has surely been the OTI/IBM team, which has been able to maintain and expand on the commercial Smalltalk opportunity. I resigned in 1995, although I stayed until the spring of 1996 to complete the first release of LearningWorks (a new Smalltalk development environment designed for developing and delivering educational curriculum).
Despite this unfortunate outcome for Smalltalk commercial efforts, the two decades of Smalltalk contribution to research and commercial support for developing innovative software systems has left a lasting impact on the computer industry. The original Dynabook and Smalltalk vision, however, has still not been realized. The last iteration of Smalltalk invention offers a significant solution for professional software system developers. The Smalltalk object model and interactive development environment are copied by all modern language systems. But the Smalltalk Dynabook goal was and still is to create an accessible information modeling system for everyone. Fortunately, Kays vision is strong and the computer industry young.
This history of Smalltalk was created by a community of some of the brightest and most dedicated people the computer industry has experienced. Their dedication to the advancement of technology and the value the technology brings to businesses and individuals has left me with remarkable personal memories of the past 25 years. Special acknowledgment to those who helped me accurately recall some of those memories: Dennis Allison, Ron Carter, Peter Deutsch, Dan Ingalls, Glenn Krasner, David Leibs, Eliott Miranda, Russ Pencin, and Bill Shauck. Of course the opinions and any errors are all mine.
Abelson, H., and A. diSessa. 1981. Turtle geometry: The computer as a medium for exploring mathematics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Birtwistle, G. M. 1979. DEMOS: A system for discrete event modeling on SIMULA. London: Macmillan.
Bly, S., S. Harrison, and S. Irwin. 1993. Media spaces: Bringing people together in a video, audio, and computing environment. Communications of the ACM 36(1):28-46.
Borning, A. 1979. ThingLab, A constraint-oriented simulation laboratory. Palo Alto, CA: Xerox PARC.
Borning, A., and D. Ingalls. 1982. Multiple inheritance in Smalltalk-80. Proceedings of the AAAI International Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Pittsburgh.
Budd, T. 1987. A little Smalltalk. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Burnett, M. M., A. Goldberg, and T. Lewis (Eds.). 1995. Visual object-oriented programming. Greenwich, CT: Manning.
Bush, V. 1945. As we may think. Atlantic Monthly 176:101-108.
Cox, B. 1986. Object-oriented programming: An evolutionary approach. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Dahl, O.-J., and K. Nygaard. 1966. SIMULAAn ALGOL-based simulation language. Communications of the ACM 9:671-678.
Deutsch, L. P. 1983. Reusability in the Smalltalk-80 programming system. ITT Workshop on Software Reusability, Newport, RI.
Deutsch, L. P., and A. Schiffman. January 1984. Efficient implementation of the Smalltalk-80 system. 11th Annual Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages.
Previous | Table of Contents | Next |