This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz
by James Robertson.
Original Post: Bits of history
Feed Title: David Buck - Blog
Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/buck-rss.xml
Feed Description: Smalltalk can do that
I first used Smalltalk somewhere around 1984 at Carleton University. At the time, it was called Smalltalk-80 Release 2.0. Needless to say, much has happened in the history of VisualWorks in that time. Every once in a while, though, I run across something that really triggers the way back machine.
Look in to the class Cursor under class methods for constants. There are cursors there that haven't been used since the late 1980's. Some of them come from the days of pop-up scroll bars. Check out this picture of Hobbes (the original Smallalk-80 running in an emulator written in VisualWorks). You would only see a scroll bar when the mouse was in the corresponding pane. If you moved the mouse to the left of the scroll bar's thumb, you got the "up" cursor and a click would scroll up one page. When the cursor was to the right of the thumb you would get a "down" cursor and a click would page down. When the cursor was on the thumb, you would get a "marker" cursor and you could scroll.
To see these cursors in VisualWorks, just find the methods and inspect the Shared variable in the method. If you dive into the "image", Trippy will show you the cursor.
Other unused cursors include "thumbsUp" and "thumbsDown" which were displayed over Ok and Cancel buttons respectively and "origin" and "corner" which were used to position and resize windows.
It's amazing these methods were never removed, but they do show how many things have changed and that VisualWorks has very deep roots.
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