English

A LANGUAGE LOST TO THE PUBLIC-- Rosetta Smalltalk Flap,1979

Rosetta Smalltalk was a version of the Smalltalk language, created by Scott Warren, that almost got out to the public in 1979. (See Warren's writeup for the ACM, included here-- see button 2, above.) (The Smalltalk language was originally designed by Alan Kay; (Alan told me he liked Warren's version.) But Rosetta Smalltalk was killed, presumably by Adele Goldberg, who was attempting to commercialize her own version of Smalltalk. ("I wish she'd just stop," Alan Kay told me.) It was to be a plug-in cartridge for the Exidy Sorcerer, a personal computer built into a keyboard at that time, and the Xanadu group announced that we would use it as the interface language for the Xanadu version we were working on-- now called Xanadu Classic, and open source as "Udanax Green". Adele Goldberg then made Scott Warren drop the project-- the details we'll never know. Whether it was the Xanadu announcement that triggered Adele Goldberg's harsh response is uncertain.

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