Smalltalk (was Re: Treasure chest!)

From: D. Peschel <dpeschel_at_u.washington.edu>
Date: Mon Oct 19 20:13:11 1998

> D. Peschel" <dpeschel_at_u.washington.edu> wrote:
> > 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.
>
> I'm not sure which machine the Magnolia is.

Well, I checked my saved messages again.

The person is Innfogra_at_aol.com, and his message did mention a Magnolia, but
it was one of the machines he had *scrapped*, not *kept*. Damn!

BTW, you said you were looking for original Xerox stuff. I read that the
University of Washington got the source code to PS (which was one of Xerox'
several implementations of Smalltalk, I think pre-Smalltalk-80, with a 68000
cross-development environment). I doubt we have it anymore. Alan Borning,
who is a professor here, doubted it also. But I'll keep looking.

And I know we had/have some Xerox Stars (?) on campus... I never got a log-in
name, so I never used them. The last time I saw them they had "Out of Order"
signs on them, which I think was a naked lie to cover up the fact that the
people had no idea what to do with them.

Note that Smalltalk was never offered on the Star. Xerox may have written it
for the bare processor (though I don't think so). They DID try to write it in
Mesa, running on top of the usual Star system, and it ran like molasses.
So that never saw the light of day. (The trivia in these Smalltalk messages
came from a new 4-volume "Handbook of Programming Languages" (I think that's
what the set is called). Fascinating books.)

I was never a person for .sig's because I could never think of an original
quote and didn't want to rip off an over-ripped-off unoriginal quote. But I
think that "God damn entropy" is going to be my motto for a while.

-- Derek
Received on Mon Oct 19 1998 - 20:13:11 BST