idle speculation (was: Face down, nine-edge first)

Jecel Assumpcao Jr jecel at merlintec.com
Sat May 13 18:29:05 UTC 2000


Duane Maxwell wrote:
> IIRC, Scott Warren's Rosetta Smalltalk ran on a 64K Z-80:
> 
> http://www.rosetta.com/TechHistory.html#rosetta-smalltalk

True - I had read this some time ago but confused this effort with the
Smalltalk-on-iAPX432 one (probably because Rosetta also developed an OO
language for the 432).

Alan Kay wrote:
> Remember that BASIC on the Altair didn't do much.

I've used some BASICs that did even less, but some people still bought
them. The floating point part is particularly impressive, though Gates
and Allen hired another programmer to develop that for them.

> I don't think that a
> Smalltalk type system would have to be much larger if it "didn't do much".

That is exactly the result I am trying to get!

> Peter Deutsch's original interactive PDP-1 LISP from the early sixties did
> do quite a bit and it was implemented in about 2000 instructions on a 4K
> (18 bit word) PDP-1. Smalltalk-72 did quite a bit and it ran quite well in
> about 16kb + the display memory.

But that included graphics and a real editor, right? And overlapping
windows? And a file system? Yes, this is way beyond what would be
needed to give BASIC a run for its money.

> It would be interesting to see how well
> the "page long" interpreter for ST-72* would do if all that were added were
> a few auxillary classes.

Exactly. I must confess that I tried very hard to improve the
interpreter you gave in that paper (specifically, I tried to move
conditional execution out of the implementation and into the language
like later Smalltalks) and failed miserably. So I continue with this
idle speculation once in a while. I don't feel I can write a good
system in 128MB unless I know I could also do a great job in 4KB...

> Of course, old PARC hands would also point out that the Altair was quite
> irrelevant since the Alto at PARC started running two years earlier in
> 1973, and there were quite a few of them by 1975. All personal computers
> today are like the Alto, none are like the Altair. The hobbiest PC movement
> was kind of a red herring and dead end (and one could say that 8-bit micros
> and most of the software that was put on them led several generations
> astray from better ways to approach personal computing. Those bad defacto
> standards are still holding back progress).

That is my point - we still suffer from the early popularity of half
baked ideas. Were we just unlucky or was that the inescapable path of
computer evolution (and the sad rule of mainframe->mini->micro
recapitulation)?

Just wondering...
-- Jecel





More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list