Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:

>shane at shaneroberts.com wrote:
>    [asking about block closures; I'll let others answer that]
>	Also, for years in the 80s and early 90s, any references I read 
>	regarding Smalltalk stated that it was too inefficient and not useful 
>	for practical applications.  I once flew to Los Angeles where I had 
>	an appointment to evaluate a Xerox Dolphin workstation running 
>	Smalltalk.  This was about 1983, and I believe the Dolphin was 
>	priced at upwards of $100,00.00.  I requested a small example of 
>	Smalltalk programming.  The representative was tentative about 
>	what sort of example to show me, so I said, "How about a simple 
>	loop that prints numbers from 1 to 1000."  So a loop was written 
>	and executed.  It never got to 1000, it was TOO SLOW!  That 
>	about cinched it for me.
>	
>Xerox Dolphins were rather slow machines.
>In about 1987 someone at Xerox PARC told me that I should really
>_really_ ask to see Smalltalk on a Dorado, and for many years the
>Smalltalk benchmark reference was "one Dorado".
>  
>
I have seen The Analyst running on a Dorado once, and it was really 
snappy and usable.
It confirmed our experience at that time that the user interface feel of 
Smalltalk
depends very much on a fast BitBlt - we had ported st-80 2.x (PS) to 
machines with
a separate BitBlt processor, and these had absolutely fantastic UI 
speeds (for the time).
At one trade show, we were asked by visitors why our X display was so 
much faster than
what he was used to on teh same machines. Well we did not run X but 
Smalltalk :-)

Cheers,
Hans-Martin