Smalltalk started to be generally available (outside research labs) in the mid-80s.
I think it started to be widely available with Squeak in the 90s -- at least, that was when I picked it up. I'd been interested before but couldn't really afford it.
Smalltalk's history seems like exactly what you'd get if you incubated something exclusively in academia, then tossed it out into the commercial world.
That's an underappreciated and hard transition in requirements.
Academia doesn't know or care about so many things that are critical in the commercial world. And the commercial world doesn't care much about many of the computing philosophies academia argues incessantly about.
I think that's why you see a higher "win rate" from things that are seeded into actual commercial use ASAP: they evolve features important to their end users. See: VB (1991), Python (1991), PHP (1994), Ruby on Rails (2004)
There are some counter-examples, but it's really hard not to have glaring blind spots if you're not working in at least a commercially-adjacent domain.
> Smalltalk's history seems like exactly what you'd get if you incubated something exclusively in academia, then tossed it out into the commercial world.
Hmm, interesting. Your comment made me see the similarity between Pascal vs C and Smalltalk vs Java. Both Pascal and Smalltalk (and Basic, for that matter) gained some traction but ultimately faded in the face of more pragmatically-focused languages.
When I got roped into using VB at work in the early 90s it didn't even occur to me to argue for Smalltalk (as far as I remember). If I'd had a free Smalltalk to satisfy my curiosity first, that could've been different, though there'd still be barriers like my manager's familiarity with Basic.
But even when it became widely available it still wasn't widely interoperable (with developer tools, filesystems ..). Interoperability is what objects are supposed to be about. The shame is that we have ended up with microservices which is such a crude developer experience (and serverless which is worse again)
I think it started to be widely available with Squeak in the 90s -- at least, that was when I picked it up. I'd been interested before but couldn't really afford it.