But Ingalls was an instinctive master at picking out the subset of Ideaspace that was actually doable, and doing it. Even before the first Altos were designed and built, Ingalls had started working on one such subset. By the time the machines were finished, his efforts had yielded the masterpiece of computer science called Smalltalk. Smalltalk would make Kay’s reputation more than Ingalls’s, but Kay never forgot who transformed it from idea to reality. “Nobody would ever have heard of me,” he said later, “if it wasn’t for Dan Ingalls.”
