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How to start Smalltalk-80 on a Lisa 1

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wmeyers12:
Hey all,

I am Rick Meyers' son and I stumbled on this thread so I thought I would chime in with a few tidbits in case anyone is interested.

My dad first saw smalltalk in 1975 when they did a demo at UC Berkeley and it blew him away. He hoped to work with Smalltalk implementation at HP in 1980, where he had been previously hired by John Couch, but was turned down by management. My dad was lamenting to Couch (who had already left for Apple by then) that HP turned him down, and Couch offered to bring him over to Apple to work on smalltalk (Larry Tesler from Xerox and then Apple was also involved with his hiring). He joined Apple in 1980. HP eventually worked on smalltalk implementation but later on.

He had smalltalk running in late 1981 on very early Lisa prototypes.  He wrote his chapter on implementation that was linked in 81 as well. Stepleton is correct that he had to be vague to tip off as little as possible about Lisa.

He reused code he developed for Smalltalk to build the drivers (mouse, cursor, keyboard, clocks, calendars, etc) for both Lisa and Mac.

As a side note, in after Mac was released he worked for about a year in secret at Bill Atkinsons' house on visions for a tablet for Apple. He still has two of the early concept prototypes (printed home screen concepts framed in glass with a drywall core to simulate hardware weight). I believe this was in 1985.

stepleton:
Welcome! And fascinating to learn that low-level driver code was in Smalltalk first... to say nothing of those tablets and all of the other things he's done. Thanks for the message!

Jacexpo:
Thank you for coming to share this with us. Very interesting indeed!

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