I don't know, but I've wondered whether they were trying to signal or encourage (in demos or usage), that this was different, than familiar business computers.

I imagine it would look a lot nicer on a CRT vs rendered in high resolution on a LED display.

Well, the CRT on our Alto is pretty old, so the text is a lot worse in person. (That's why I used screenshots instead of photos.) But I think that even with a good monitor, the Smalltalk font would be quirky at best.

This font is called "Cream" and was designed and created by Bob Flegal to look identical on both screens and laser printers.

cf. https://squeak-dev.squeakfoundation.narkive.com/Rs0CrNOk/fon...

It was the late 70s/early 80s, so a certain amount of twee whimsy was obligatory.

That model stops working as soon as you try to distribute software at scale. You need some kind of standardisation and baseline. Otherwise your customisations conflict with someone else's customisations, with consequences that vary from mildly annoying to catastrophic. And the whole idea of shared software collapses.

It would work if you had strict access control to each feature in a common code base. But Git hadn't been invented yet.

The other issue is performance. Compiled ST isn't particularly slow, but you lose the modifiability. Interpreted ST has a mixed profile - some features are slow, some are fast - but generally it was slow compared to C.

Today that doesn't matter so much, but it was a drawback at the time.

It's a seductive model and I totally get the appeal. But it's not quite as straightforwardly superior as it might appear to be.

The "modifiable image" model to me poses a huge problem of just not knowing what has changed and what is going on. I believe that things like Pharoh integrate into version control, but just on a fundamental level being able to throw away everything and go back to some notion of a clean state is very helpful when working on a mutable system.

Distributed version control and CI makes it way more tractable to work on even a small team IMO.

I would be very curious to see someone stream a "real" workflow using something like Pharoh or other smalltalk-like envs though. There's a bunch of short clips showing "beginner" demos but for such a visual system I would expect there to be more detailed presentations of the actual workflow.