Actually, Self was one of the three proposals for the Smalltlak-86 project described in this page. David Ungar (from Stanford) joined forces with Randy Smith (Xerox Parc) who had done ARK (the Alternate Reality Kit). ARK had the visual equivalent to classes but users ignored those and preferred to just copy and existing instance instead. They wondered if a whole language could be based on this.
Randy moved to England after they published a paper at OOPSLA so David put his PhD students at Stanford to try to actually implement their proposal. Since David just wanted to do research instead of working as a professor, he moved his whole team to the newly created SunLabs (in 1991, I think).
Randy moved to England after they published a paper at OOPSLA so David put his PhD students at Stanford to try to actually implement their proposal. Since David just wanted to do research instead of working as a professor, he moved his whole team to the newly created SunLabs (in 1991, I think).