Bob Courchaine bobc@nfldinet.com wrote:
So both this effort and the exobox were vaporized. I see a trend...
And don't forget the Active Book, a 1990 era tablet running Smalltalk on an ARM2. I worked on that one too, until the company was bought out by ATT and closed down; an easy way to reduce competition for the very useless PenPoint/Go/EO stuff.
Oh, and the Momenta, which ran a version of Digitalk ST/V on a X86 variant and had poor battery life.
Tim, in your opinion, would this be worth trying one more time?
It's almost always trying again when the idea is a good one.
If so, would it have to be started from scratch or is anything out there that could be reused/revived?
Knowledge mostly is reusable. Code rarely. There are a number of people with experience of working on these things and a way to get them together with funding to really tackle the problem would be needed. Clear aims are kinda useful when hoping to make a product- exobox was the only place I ever worked at with that part under control.
Whether it's really sensible to try to make Squeak be an OS is an interesting argument. I suspect the answer these days is 'no' because one really doesn't want to rewrite tcp/ip stacks if possible, just as one example.
tim -- Tim Rowledge, tim@rowledge.org, http://www.rowledge.org/tim Strange OpCodes: CSF: Charge to NSF