At 11:25 AM -0500 4/9/98, Tim Olson wrote:
>>And if you saw the demo of Squeak running on the "bare-chip" Mitsubishi
>>computer at OOPSLA, you know that we mean this!
>
>This sounds interesting -- for those of us that weren't there, can you 
>describe it a bit?

Sure! The background is the Mitsubishi has a nifty single-chip RISC
computer that integrates RAM on the same chip as the CPU. But they
didn't have any software for it. So they got a bright summer intern
named Curtis Wickman to port Squeak to it.

Curtis had to write all the device drivers from scratch,
including a display driver, the mouse and keyboard handlers, a
Flash RAM file system, a loader, and sound output.

This took four to six weeks, I think. However, we were
then able to put a generic Squeak image onto it and it looked and
behaved exactly as it does on a PC or Macintosh. Even though we knew
intellectually that this would be the case, it was somewhat mind-bending
when Alan grabbed the mouse during our demo began doing an unrehearsed
demo and everything worked perfectly!

The amount of code required for this "bare machine" implementation
was quite modest; 2000 lines of C and a hundred or so of assembly
code, as I recall.

	-- John