Folks -

I said that we would have 2.0 out on Friday the 22nd, and we did exactly that.  However, now that I've had a chance to sleep a little, I would like to add some appropriate commentary.

You should know that the Squeak team ran utterly flat out for at least the month leading up to this release.  The picture when we finally shipped was the geographically distributed equivalent of a computer with FTP on the screen, surrounded by 4 bodies collapsed on the floor with x's where there eyes should be. 

So, first of all, Ted, John, and Scott, thank you, each, for dedication that can only be explained by love for what you do.

For me personally, I simply didn't have the energy left to complete an appropriate acknowledgement after storing the files out (and giving you the wrong server reference ;-).  What I wanted to say, though, boils down to this:  None of this would be the same without you...

In particular, the promise of Squeak's remarkable cross-platform compatibility has only been realized because of continuing hard work outside Squeak Central by Andreas Raab and Ian Piumarta.  Andreas has been an invaluable collaborator on matters related to the Win32 port. In particular, he worked out how to implement MIDI, serial port access, full screen mode, high-resolution timer access, and printing support on the Win32 platforms, as well as helping with the design of these primitives.  Ian has always kept the UNIX ports up to date, and continues to move Jitter toward a point where it can take on the role of mainstreamVM with a significant performance boost.

The ftp archives and e-mail distribution that tie this community together are fostered by significant commitments from Stephen Pope, John Brant and Ralph Johnson.

The WikiWiki servers that have become central to our collaboration and public appearance are the result of work by Ward Cunningham, Georg Gollman, and Mark Guzdial and his students

Many improvements to Squeak numeric support have been suggested or actually supplied by a savvy crew that includes Tim Olson, Leandro Caniglia, Wim Boot, Hans-Martin Mosner, and David Smith.

This release includes fledgling support for MIDI. Thanks to Stephen Pope for proposing a simple primitive interface that is sufficient to support basic MIDI on a wide range of hardware, while being upward compatible with the more extensive set of primitives needed for his SIREN computer music workbench. This work is not yet complete, but it is an exciting beginning.

Our original intention in releasing the beta version of Squeak 2.0 was simply to give people a chance to discover serious incompatibilities before the actual release.  However this process was transformed by a number of folks who tested the image, tracked our updates, and contributed many bug reports and a number of bug fixes.  Special credit in this area goes to Bill Dargel, Reinier van Loon, Gerardo Richarte, Tom Morgan, Georg Gollmann, Luciano Notarfrancesco, and Tim Rowledge.

[There is a risk in specific acknowledgements, that one may leave somebody out.  If this has happened, I hope you will pardon me, and let me know of my omission.]

Much neat stuff did not make it into 2.0, and much of what is there remains to be completed.  But I think we have a great process going, and I just want to say that if it stays being this much fun, there is no limit to what we can do.

Thanks, all, for your part in making Squeak what it is.

	- Dan