I’d love to believe this: A Smalltalk universe of objects with a foundation in the Unix files & processes & pipes model would be intriguing.
But it ignores the commercial aspect: I don’t think anyone was giving away an industrial strength Smalltalk development environment at the same time gcc was gaining traction against the proprietary C/C++ toolchains.
What Smalltalk really needed was a Linus or a Guido ca. 1993.
Smalltalk needed that in 1983, not 1993. By 1993 it was too late, consumers expected a personal computer to be, well, a PC, defined by the norms and standards of the successful entrants from the 80s, IBM and Apple. In 1983 they were still open to alternatives. By 1993 they expect C or a Wirth PL, files/filesystems, and maybe a Mac-like desktop metaphor.
In large part the problem was the vision that the language offered was beyond what consumer-accessible hardware could handle well by at least 10 years. The Alto was a bespoke minicompter-esque machine custom built by Xerox and was far beyond what landed on regular office desks until the late 80s. Tektronix and others tried really hard to optimize Smalltalk-80 to run on 8mhz/68000 class machines at reasonable spec and it was still pretty sluggish. On top of clock speed, RAM and disk space was super expensive in the 80s.
And Smalltalk was also heavily blockaded by gatekeepers commercial and academic until it was too late, as well. There was no serious open source Smalltalk-80 until Squeak in the late 90s.
Sept 21, 1987 — "A version of the Smalltalk-80 object-oriented development environment … has been announced by Parcplace Systems.
Smalltalk-80 DE version 2.2 is said to provide Unix environments with interprocess communication via sockets and access to Unix C shells. On the Apple Macintosh, it provides access to Desk Accessories and provides the ability to cut and paste between the Smalltalk-80 system and the clipboard."
Ok, sure, but "is said to provide" is not proof that it provided that. Lots of companies have put out marketing material that blatantly lied or inaccurately represented their upcoming product -- in fact not only was it more blatant back then but the term originated back then - "Vapourware".
The fact that the only papers thusfar procured were written 15 years later really does not help your point.
Just waiting for someone to say what exactly they mean by interoperability, and then have them show it was not provided in Smalltalk implementations (and then have them show it was provided by other tools during the same period).
But it ignores the commercial aspect: I don’t think anyone was giving away an industrial strength Smalltalk development environment at the same time gcc was gaining traction against the proprietary C/C++ toolchains.
What Smalltalk really needed was a Linus or a Guido ca. 1993.