oldest bits in Squeak?

Jecel Assumpcao Jr jecel at merlintec.com
Tue Feb 17 22:52:31 UTC 2004


On Tuesday 17 February 2004 18:13, Lex Spoon wrote:
> How old are the oldest bits in Squeak?  When was the last time an
> image was created from scratch, as opposed to being modified from a
> previous version?  I know this idea has gone around before, but I
> want to double check.

On page 25 of the "green book", Dan Ingalls wrote:

    This truly marked the beginning of a new era: there are many
    bits in the Smalltalk-80 release of today which are copies of
    those bits first cloned in 1977.

and on the previous page:

    While Smalltalk-72 and -74 were used as long-lived evolving
    images, the systems as released were always generated from
    scratch, by reading a set of system definitions into a bootstrap
    kernel. With the Smalltalk-76 system, we took a bold step and
    opted to ignore support for system generation. The system was
    built in two parts: a Virtual Machine was written in microcode
    and machine code, and a virtual image was cross-compiled from
    a simulation done in Smalltalk-74.

> I would like to claim that every Squeak image is a suspended program
> that has been running since 19__, which is a pretty good record of
> software reuse!  It also can make curly-brace people rethink the idea
> of restarting their program from scratch whenever they make a tiny
> change.

At least 1977.

-- Jecel



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