Interviewed by Hansen Hsu on 2025-09-19 in Mountain View, CA
© Computer History Museum
Evelyn Van Orden, née Boka, was born in Aurora, Colorado, but moved to Santa Ana, California, at the age of 3, and later to Los Angeles. She was the oldest of a large family, and attended Immaculate Heart High School in Hollywood. Young Evelyn learned to program in a programming class in high school. She attended USC on a full scholarship from 1973-1977, and majored in computer science, being part of USC’s second class in what was then a new program. During college she worked at the USC computer center as a systems programmer on a PDP-10, one of the earliest ARPANET nodes. In her senior year, she had an internship at Hughes Research Labs in Malibu, and after graduation in 1977 spent 9 months at Hughes Aircraft working on software for the F15 fighter jet, then returned to Hughes Research Labs.
Van Orden decided she no longer wanted to do work requiring a security clearance, so she accepted a job in March 1979 at Xerox Electro Optical Systems in Pasadena, later renamed Xerox Special Information Systems, working in the Publishing Systems Department on software for bitmap font design on an Alto. After Charles Simonyi left Xerox PARC, Van Orden became the maintainer of his Bravo word processor. In December 1979, she saw a demo of Smalltalk-76 that would change her life. Soon after, Van Orden and a colleague created PubEditor, a desktop publishing program, in Smalltalk-76, demonstrating it to the New York Times and other organizations.
Based on these PubEditor demos, in 1982 or 1983 Xerox SIS signed a contract with the CIA to develop an information management application called The Analyst™, to be developed in Smalltalk-80. Because working on The Analyst™ would have required security clearance, Van Orden instead sought to productize Smalltalk-80, which was still a research project at PARC, by engineering a stable platform for the development of software applications, and porting the virtual machine to newer Xerox workstations such as the Dolphin and Dorado, then to non-Xerox computers such as Tektronix, Apollo, DEC and Sun workstations, plus IBM PC and Apple Lisa and Macintosh. This was the first work done to transfer Smalltalk from research to customer use outside of Xerox.
To commercialize Smalltalk-80, Van Orden worked with Glenn Krasner at PARC to synchronize code changes, get feedback, and manage virtual image releases. The first commercial version of Smalltalk-80, “Commercial Version 3” (CV3), was released in 1983, and one of the first customers and beta testers was Tom Love at Schlumberger. Love and Brad Cox would later create the Objective-C language, heavily influenced by Smalltalk. Smalltalk-80 CV3 and CV4 (a much more stable version released in 1984) were sold on the Xerox 1100,1132, and 1108 LISP workstations (productized versions of the Dolphin, Dorado, and Dandelion), but most customers also bought the add-on $5000 Smalltalk package. From 1985-88, when ParcPlace Systems was spinning out from Xerox, many Smalltalk users began to switch to Sun workstations.
In addition to product engineering and providing almost all domestic customer support for Smalltalk, Van Orden was instrumental in marketing and evangelizing commercial Smalltalk, as well as HUMBLE™, an expert systems AI application developed by Kurt Piersol, a lead developer of The Analyst™. In 1986, Van Orden served on the Planning Committee for the first OOPLSA conference, and created the Tutorials Section, which sold out and made the conference profitable. After ParcPlace Systems spun out of Xerox, taking the Smalltalk business with it, Van Orden shifted to marketing the remaining Xerox Smalltalk products until Xerox no longer supported them. Van Orden retired from Xerox, and the computer industry, in 1992.
- Note: Transcripts represent what was said in the interview. However, to enhance meaning or add clarification, interviewees have the opportunity to modify this text afterward. This may result in discrepancies between the transcript and the video. Please refer to the transcript for further information – http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102809039
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Catalog number: 102809040
Acquisition number: 2024.0152
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