The next slide is a video screen capture of me wiring up database components. I'll also add some scaffolding so I can watch the progress with live data. Then I'll remove the scaffolding and encapsulate the remaining wiring diagram into a new component that I can reuse.

The tool is a proof-of-concept prototype. It is built on ancient technology, much of it in the 1992 to 1996 time frame, using a now-obsolete Smalltalk running on Windows 3.1, also obsolete. That all is running in Windows XP in compatibility mode, in a Parallels virtual machine on a Mac.

Smalltalk is basically a sandbox in which I experiment. I spend too much of my time keeping the Smalltalk-Windows part running—it’s pretty fragile—but frankly, given the moment in time, around 1992, when I had to choose my platform, I don’t know how else I could have done this work.