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In early April of 1973, just a little over
three months from the start, the first Interim Dynabook,
known as 'Bilbo,' greeted the world and we had the first
bit-map picture on the screen within minutes: the Muppets'
Cookie Monster that I had sketched on our painting system.
Soon Dan Ingalls had bootstrapped Smalltalk
across, and for many months it was the sole software system
to run on the Interim Dynabook. The Smalltalk interpreter
on the Interim Dynabook was not exactly zippy ("majestic"
was one pronouncement), but was easy to change and quite
fast enough for many real-time interactive systems to
be built on it.
Overlapping windows were the first project
tackled after writing the code to read the keyboard and
create a string of text. An early version of a bit field
block transfer (bitblt) for displaying variable pitch
fonts and generally writing on the display. The first
window versions were done as real dragable objects that
were just a little too slow to be useful.
One of the next things to be implemented
on the Interim Dynabook was an object-oriented version
of the LOGO turtle [inspired by Seymour Papert]. This
could make many turtle "instances" that were
used both for drawing and as a kind of value for graphics
transformations.
Since we had no idea how to teach object-oriented
programming to children (or anyone else), the first experiments
Adele did mimicked LOGO turtle graphics and she got what
appeared to be very similar results. That is to say, the
children could get the turtle to draw pictures on the
screen, but there seemed to be little happening beyond
surface effects.
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