I just got an email this morning informing me that my e-mail entry won a contest on boingboing gadgetsto win an original copy of each of the original Xerox Parc Smalltalk-72 and Alto manuals.

I'm looking forward to adding these to my collection of tech mementos.

The winning entry pointed to two articles I'd written here about Alan Kay

• Alan on the meaning of OOP
• An article on a Business Week comic strip about Alan and the invention of the Dynabook, which triggered some memories of some other past associations

And I also threw in this scan of one of my current treasured mementos. This is an autograph page from the supplemental programming manual for Digitalk Smalltalk/V PM which was presented to me at Digitalk's developers conference. I'd been working closely with Digitalk on the release in my capacity as their liaison with IBM, and I gave a talk there.

Alan was also a speaker there. Alan had been instrumental in getting Digitalk to change the name of their product from Methods (which they'd picked to avoid issues with Xerox) to Smalltalk/V. I'm pretty sure that I'd already met Alan at one or two IBM internal OOP conferences. So Alan signed too, and I've highlighted his personalized autograph.

If you want you can click on the picture for a larger view.