Steve Putz and I built Babar together while I was summer
intern at Parc. Celeste is a simplified version of that
system that I implemented from scratch when I returned to
graduate school at the University of Washington. I used it
for the rest of my graduate school career. When we built
Squeak, I ported to Celeste to it and Lex Spoon added the
networking code to make it talk to POP3 and SMTP servers.

So, yes, the name Celeste is meant to pay homage to Babar,
which was a really nice mail reader with many cool features
that aren't in Celeste.

	-- John

At 2:30 AM -0700 6/16/99, Michael S. Klein wrote:
>I guess, then, that the pink bunny in Vunderland is Scamper.
>Does anybody know the story behind Celeste?
>I heard it had something to do with Babar the Elephant.


At 4:00 PM -0700 6/16/99, Stephen Pope wrote:
>This sounds right, but John Maloney named Celeste, I believe.
>
>stp
>
>Glenn Krasner wrote:
>> 
>> Mike,
>> 
>> Steve Putz at PARC, in the mid-'80s built a great email system in Smalltalk
>> that he called "Babar" (elephant never forgets); see
>> http://www.parc.xerox.com/pubs.html. In addition to regular mail stuff, it
>> kept the email in a database, and had unique IDs for each email, so that it
>> could uniquely save each email (rather than a copy of just the text in each
>> "folder") and so it could maintain reference links for threads of email
>> conversation and things like that.
>> 
>> I assume that Stephen picked "Celeste" as an homage to Steve's Babar.
>> Right, Stephen?