HackerTube

THE VIDEO SHELF · smalltalk and xerox parc

Alan Kay's tribute to Ted Nelson at "Intertwingled" Festival

Alan Kay's tribute to Ted Nelson at the Intertwingled festival, presented using a revived Smalltalk-78 system running on emulated 1970s Xerox PARC hardware. It shows live, user-programmable software from that era.

Watch & explore the libraryYouTube ↗

Why HN readers recommended it

HN returns to it again and again as a demonstration of how programmable and composable 1970s systems were compared with today's.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel
TheTedNelson
Topic
smalltalk and xerox parc
Format
demo
Level
intermediate
HN recommenders in dataset
7
HN mentions in dataset
20
Recommendation years in dataset
2016–2025

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

  • OP here. Definitely some improvements... but (at least in my eyes) incremental. Notebooks are pretty sweet, but in the hands of very few. They're definitely growing in popularity, which is great. But even the "notebook" concept is a very limited "low pass filter" version of …

    kennethfriedman on Hacker News · 2017-09
    In Then and Now: How Little Things Have Changed (2016)

  • The Alto did things that even modern computers don't do as well. There's a demo I like to point at for this: [VIDEO] Look how programmable this is by the user! Today's OSes and their division of software into "applications" erect barriers to software composition …

    ryukafalz on Hacker News · 2023-03
    In 50 Years Later, We’re Still Living in the Xerox Alto’s World

  • People often ask me "Is this a Dynabook, is that a Dynabook?". Only about 5% of the idea was in packaging (and there were 2 other different packages contemplated in 1968 besides the tablet idea -- the HMD idea from Ivan, and the ubiquitous idea …

    alankay on Hacker News · 2017-09
    In Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true

Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.

Keep exploring