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by lobster_johnson 3802 days ago
I had no idea that Dahl and Nygaard ever visited you at PARC, that's fascinating. Growing up in Norway and learning programming in school, Simula was revered as a proud if distant national accomplishment, in an field where there weren't much else to be proud of (though this was also around the time when Norsk Data [1] collapsed, and people weren't really talking about how innovative they had been). I wish I had learned about Smalltalk back then; I didn't really look closely at it until I learned Objective-C.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norsk_Data
1 comments
lectrick 3802 days ago
"Throughout its history Norsk Data produced a long string of extremely innovative systems, with a disproportionately large number of world firsts."

Still seems like something worth being proud of. It just got sideswiped by the personal computer industry (a lot of things did).

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lobster_johnson 3802 days ago
Definitely. For example, not a lot of people know that Tim Berners-Lee developed his first hypertext system, ENQUIRE, an ND machine (the NORD-16 minicomputer running the operating system SINTRAN) [1].

[1] http://history-computer.com/Internet/Maturing/Lee.html

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