Sadly, Dave died in April 2004. His many friends will remember him always as a damn fine chap. An IBM bigwig once described him to me as "Dave Smith - 6ft lots, 350lbs, does anything he damn well likes". Fortunately for us, Dave liked to come up with interesting things. Gonna miss him.
Prompting the User, a collection of ways to prompt for permission, strings, etc.Prompting the user
My webpage has info on books I've written, my buddy Archie who sleeps under my feet, and more.
I'm a programmer who started on punch cards in the mid-60's writing FORTRAN, then S/360 Assembler, then C, then Smalltalk, with stops along the way for brief visits or parallel activities with many others. I haven't missed punch cards since the first time I carried a tray of them (4000 cards + steel drawer) 500 feet to 'submit' a 'job'.
I started using Smalltalk in about 1984 with Ungar's Sun VM and an image licensed from Adele Goldberg at XEROX PARC. I tended to follow the Digitalk track once Methods and Smalltalk/V were out.
When IBM Smalltalk came out I switched, and have used it since version 1 for most things. I keep as many variants of Smalltalk around as I can get free or afford, and it hasn't been more than a couple of years or so that I last wrote some production code in V/Mac. One cannot understand Smalltalk if one lives within one implementation.
Since late 1999, I've been a serious and full time Squeaker, learning Morphic and other Squeak neat things. I'm now working on a project which uses Squeak and Morphic for a series of programs for 1st and 2nd graders. This isn't a product, but research. As of late 2001 it is in limited use in schools in NYC with a 'big' study planned for 2002.
I always use the middle initial 'N' in my name since there are a number of other Dave Smiths around the Smalltalk arena, including:
Dave W. Smith, from what was PARCPlace last I heard.
David Canfield Smith, of STAR fame and more.
David R. Smith, a student with strong opinions.
