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

Jecel Assumpcao Jr jecel at merlintec.com
Fri May 12 23:05:51 UTC 2000


On Wed, 10 May 2000, Peter Crowther wrote:
> Alan?  Dan?  Fancy building Squeak on a machine that only has one
> instruction? :-)

Actually, I am doing just that. The internal architecture of the
processor only has the conditional move instruction while the user
visible architecture is the bytecodes (Self bytecodes rather than
Squeak ones, but that is changeable...). Ok, so I cheat - there are
various memory mapped functional units (so when you move data to two
addresses their sum magically appears at a third address).

This thread has shown me that people on this list like to stray off
topic and they like to remember the old days. So I thought I might
share a bit of idle speculation I sometimes enjoy:

Imagine that one day you wake up and find you have been transported
back in time to January of 1975. You still remember most events as they
originally happened up to today and, better yet, find your trusty
laptop is still with you. On it you have the latest release of Squeak
(who would be caught without it?) and lots of junk, including a very
nice Altair emulator.

Now here is my question - using all this, can you create something that
will run on the 4KB Altair that will be so superior to the future
Micro-Soft Basic that you will change history and take computing in a
better direction? Remember, both the language/system itself *and* one
reasonable application must run in that 4KB.

If you thought Forth, then you were close but not quite there. Forth
was, in fact, available back then and could have run on that machine.
But it wasn't user friendly enough to spread beyond a small group.

If you thought tinySqueak, that is what I am trying to imagine. But all
of the efforts to run Smalltalk on 8 bit processors that I am aware of
needed 64KB or more (TinyTalk by Larry Tesler and Kim McCall,
Smalltalk-PC by Christopher Macie). Smalltalk-72 was amazingly compact,
but I am not sure even it would fit.

What got me thinking about all this was an evaluation I did a while ago
to see if the ARM7500 would make a reasonable Squeak machine (not
quite). So I began to wonder if the stuff we do has a kind of lower
bound. Must early computing really start with Basic and friends and
must better things wait for the arrival of "real machines"?

Cheers,
-- Jecel





More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list