IBM VisualAge - Early History

Early History

VisualAge was born in the IBM development lab in Cary, North Carolina, which was established in 1984 and had responsibility for application development tools. The EZ-VU dialog manager product, a personal computer derivative of the user interface elements of the ISPF 327x product was one of the first products in this family. The lab also had a group which was one of the early adopters of object-oriented programming technologies within IBM using an internally developed language called ClassC to develop applications with more sophisticated graphical user interfaces which were just starting to be widely available.

Eventually, the availability of usable implementations of Smalltalk for IBM PC-AT class machines allowed IBM advanced technology projects to experiment with Smalltalk. At about the same time, visual interface construction tools were coming up on the radar screens. Smalltalk research projects such as InterCons by David N. Smith of IBM, and Fabrik by a team at Apple led by Dan Ingalls were building interactive graphical applications built from composition of graphical primitives. Higher level construction of user interfaces was evidenced by other tools such as Jean-Marie Hullot's interface builder first done in Lisp and then evolved to become the Interface Builder tool in NeXTStep, and later Mac OS X, which allowed for building user interfaces by WYSIWYG composition of UI widgets which could be "wired" to each other and to application logic written in Objective-C. The original prototype which led to VisualAge was an attempt "to make something like the NeXT interface builder" within the Smalltalk/V development environment. By the time VisualAge was released as a product, much more emphasis was placed on visual construction of application logic as well as of the user interface. This emphasis was in part due to the "positioning" for "strategic" reasons of Smalltalk as a generator rather than a language within IBM's System Application Architecture.