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I'm assuming the "by the Bluebook" implementation they're referring to is this: https://github.com/devhawala/ST80
It's nice to use, but awkward because almost nobody has a three-button mouse laying around. One of the cool things about the Blue Book is that it lays out exactly how to implement e.g. graphics primitives and even the object system itself. In fact, the implementation I linked above uses the exact implementation of these things as outlined in the Blue Book, just written in Java.
> The first thing is that the Smalltalk environment wasn't really an operating system the same way something like Mac OS was. It’s more like an IDE that runs on bare hardware.
I disagree with this. It is an operating system. Just because it doesn't have barriers like a kernel and doesn't treat debuggers as third-class citizens doesn't make it any less of an operating system. It just makes it "not Unix". Lisp machines were also very similar in this regard: there is no "system" in the Unix sense: your compiler, debugger, and system were a whole unit.
> The Smalltalk environment was a revolutionary GUI, but it was still a system you would have had to have been a computer operator or something to really use.
Probably true. But I'd also like to mention the images in the GitHub link I posted are very early snapshots of Smalltalk-80 and may lack any features that were added later. More importantly, the author is missing that these machines came with a manual that likely described how to use the interface. But I do have have to concede: these machines were extremely expensive and definitely not targetted towards "everyday people".
> * I'm assuming the "by the Bluebook" implementation they're referring to is this: *
Or this: https://github.com/rochus-keller/Smalltalk/
People can try the emulator.¹
Key to understanding is that GUI operations were two-handed, descending directly from NLS (people have all seen the ‘mother of all demos’², right?). Right hand on the mouse, left hand on the left function key cluster³ — one of the Star papers is explicit that the left cluster was a direct substitution for the NLS/Alto chord set.
A very noticeable difference from the familiar Lisa lineage is Move and Copy vs Cut and Paste — there was no clipboard. (Here I think Star got it right and Tesler got it wrong: the condition of the clipboard containing invisible fragile state is a mode, and a worse one than move-in-progress.)
¹ https://github.com/livingcomputermuseum/Darkstar
² https://dougengelbart.org/content/view/209/
³ https://digibarn.com/friends/curbow/star/keyboard/