Ardent Titan and the ParcPlace Navigator for UNIX

Histories
1

Now, to provide a bit of modern context, we’ll have to start on a tangent. On Hacker News, there’s an article at ThoughtStorms Wiki featured, which argues for a “SmallTalkUnix”. The point of this article is about Smalltalk missing the chance of connecting to UNIX by missing the importance of text files.

There’s nothing that can’t be represented by a good text file. I’ll go further and say that it’s denial of text-files (and the underlying file-system standards, text file management tools) that ultimately killed SmallTalk. Had someone seen this clearly in 1980, and figured out how make a transparent two-way connection between Smalltalk space and text-file space, we might have seen a very different evolution of computing : a true synthesis of Smalltalk and Unix.

Smalltalk could have become the graphical shell on top of Unix, providing it instantly with a sophisticated GUI (rather than wait for the X consortium to re-invent the wheel), in a language that was optimised for GUI programming (rather than C and then the hell of C++). Smalltalk would have been the default OO language for professional GUI apps. on workstations from Sun and Silicon Graphics. It would have been the default scripting language in Unix.

Well, this may have been quite remarkable, if this had ever happened. This really looks like an entrance to an interisting hole, and it’s certainly rabbit-sized, so we really should follow this all way down.

As usual, a Hacker News link comes with a discussion, and it’s in this very discussion that HN users reminded us that there had been such a thing, namely Smalltalk used as a UNIX shell for the Ardent Titan “mini-supercomputer”. And there are also some links!

The Rhode Island Computer Museum (RICM) has a page on the Ardent Titan Graphics Supercomputer, which came with AT&T System V.3 UNIX and Berkeley 4.3 UNIX and supports VAX/VMS extensions and CRAY vectorizing directives. The graphics in “Graphics Supercomputer”, came with Navigator for UNIX, a graphical Smalltalk shell with a demo version of Smalltalk 80.
In 1987, it could be all yours, beginning at list price of $79,000.

There’s also a running example at VAXBARN and a YouTube video of it, but, alas, this does not show Navigator for UNIX.

However, HeavenEverywhere Media has a dedicated page “A Navigator for UNIX”, including screenshots and even a QuickTime movie for download. (Sadly, this file isn’t compatible with current versions of QuickTime Player. Better formats may be available via ACM SIGGRAPH, Video Review Library, Issue 46, CHI’89 demos.)

So Navigator for UNIX was designed/developed by Adele Goldberg, Stephen T. Pope and David Leibs, apparently at Xerox Parc (I guess). Implementation by David Leibs, Stephen T. Pope, and Tom Wadlow. The description goes as follows:

The ParcPlace Navigator for UNIX is/was a novel user interface paradigm for managing large volumes of structured data. It used the browsing model of paths, places, and contents together with a division of items into data (files) and capabilities (tasks or scripts) in a unique 5-paned GUI we called the SwissArmyKnife view.

navigator-for-unix-8
(Navigator for Unix, screenshot / video still via HeavenEverywhere Media.)

This is indeed an interesting alternate history of computing. May we call this scenario “Adele’s revenge”? :wink:

Links:

3 Likes
2

Looks like some helpful ACM person has put this up on YouTube:

2 Likes
3

I did try to look it up at Archive.org, but not at YT. Sometimes you miss the obvious.
Thanks for digging this up, it’s really helpful for understanding the system. – Pretty fascinating.
(The property sheets and action forms metaphors look somewhat reminiscent of what Xerox SDD did for the Star.)

4

As someone who worked on both Unix and Smalltalk since the 1980s, I don’t think having Smalltalk become a shell of Unix was ever a possibility.

C++ had two things going for it: it was perceived as the official successor to C since it also came from Bell Labs (unlike Objective-C, Actor and so many other “C with classes” of the time) and it ran on more modest machines than Smalltalk did.

Tim Budd’s Little Smalltalk did run on modest machines and on text terminals, so it could have been a cute alternative to the various Unix shells (no GUI). But it never caught on despite having a very nice book associated with it.

One bit of trivia: when someone spells it “SmallTalk” we consider it an indication that the person doesn’t actually know the language even if they are a fan of it. Unlike BASIC or FORTRAN that you can spell however you want, “Smalltalk” is an actual global variable in the language and misspelling it will make your program no work.