On the original smalltalk balloon the red, yellow and blue are in the same order as the Romanian (and Chadian) flag, so maybe the question should have been why is it not the Romanian flag?
Ralph -
Many times I have browsed past your article "About the Smalltalk
Balloon" and been tempted to add to the little bit of history that you
have there. While your link is entitled "Why a hot-air balloon is the
symbol of Smalltalk," you never really answer the question. The time
has come to tie up that loose end. Return with us now to those
thrilling days of yesteryear, and
The Real Story About the Smalltalk Balloon
Everyone in our group wanted to challenge the ivory tower image in
Byte's special issue on Pascal, because in fact we were all working
intensely to get Smalltalk-80 out the door from Xerox at the time.
The cover of that issue depicted the "land of Smalltalk" as a remote
island, and that triggered a connection for me out of which was born
the fanstasy of liberating Smalltalk from the ivory tower by balloon
ascent.
Here is the connection...
My favorite book from youth was The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne.
It is the story of an engineer, Cyrus Harding, who gets blown far
afield in a storm during a balloon surveillance mission in the 1860's.
He ends up stranded on an island but, through ingenuity and a bit of
luck, he manages to recreate most of the accomplishments and comforts
of civilization on his own (with a little help from an amiable
orangutan ;-). Cyrus Harding became my childhood standard for
resourcefulness and the conviction that anything can be accomplished
if you are clever and persistent.
The fantasy of a balloon as the vehicle for Smalltalk's release stuck
with me from then on. When the opportunity came to design the cover
for the Byte issue on Smalltalk, I made the suggestion of the balloon
lifting off from the island shown on the Pascal cover, and everyone
picked up on it. Robert Tinney executed the wonderful graphic that we
know so well, and the rest is history.
- Dan
P.S. There is a further coincidence in this particular literary
allusion: It is revealed at the end of The Mysterious Island that the
island is actually the base of operations for a more well-known Verne
character, and that character happens also to be the childhood hero of
a more well-known figure in the history of Smalltalk.
As creator of the language and the logo...:
It is not meant to be the Romanian or any other flag.
It was indeed modeled after the Smalltalk balloon on the BYTE Magazine linked,
but simplified into 3 'basic' colors: red, yellow (iso green) and blue,
each with a slightly darker shade to make it look better.
PS I own a copy of that visionairy BYTE magazine :-).
