Burn The Diskpacks

AlanKay said that it is hard to change a system if you have to worry about backwards compatibility and keeping your legacy running. Progress means leaving the old world behind.

Therefore, burn the diskpacks.

The advice was given to the smalltalk team on their completion of smalltalk-78, the first really well engineered implementation of the language. (They didn't burn em, and smalltalk evolution has stalled since then.)

Alto with
diskpacks.

See EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk for more details of the very interesting context in 1976 when AlanKay most famously said this.

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