Agents Resurrect the System Image: Why 1970s Tech is the Future of Computing
The beanbag chairs were orange, the carpets were shag, and Adele Goldberg and Alan Kay were talking about a “personal dynamic medium” that functioned less like a tool and more like an organism. In the early 1970s at Xerox PARC, the vision for computing wasn’t about text files or directory trees. It was about the System Image. In environments like Smalltalk-80, you didn’t “write code” in the modern, disconnected sense. You inhabited a live environment where the code, the data, and the execution state were a single, indivisible entity. You didn’t save a file; you saved the image—a snapshot of a living system. ...
