> I just went through a pile of stuff in the storage room I use for an office,
> and found the following (which the boss is letting me keep):
[...]
> - Smalltalk pre-beta release version 0.3 for the Mac (is this a port of the
> Smalltalk that ran on the Xerox PARC? I'm pretty ignorant about that.)
Well, I've been playing with Smalltalk. (I have the "Blue Book" checked out
of the library right now.) I've been reading about the history of Smalltalk
too. It could be a port. Xerox wanted to commercialize Smalltalk, so they
selected four companies -- Apple, Digital, HP, and Tektronix. Each company
would help with Xerox' book editing -- writing documentation is always a lot
of work :) -- and would be able to port Smalltalk to their respective work-
stations or computers.
Describe the disks. Do they have a date? Is the label homemade or not?
What are the files on them? (I don't think I would RUN those files without
making a copy, though.)
BTW, someone mentioned that he had a Tektronix Magnolia. This was one of
Tek's workstations of the 80's, and Tek's share of the porting effort was to
put Smalltalk on the Magnolia. I would definitely like to find out more
about THAT machine.
Also, a few years ago Apple wrote a research version of Smalltalk called
Squeak. They dropped it (as they tend to do) but Disney took it over. It's
freely available. It may be a descendant of Apple's experience with Xerox
since it seems to include much of the original Xerox code. See
http://www.create.ucsb.edu/squeak/
http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak.1
But I'd still love to play with one of the oroginal 80's implementaions!
-- Derek
Received on Mon Oct 19 1998 - 03:24:35 BST