Bob Courchaine <bobc at nfldinet.com> wrote:

> So both this effort and the exobox were vaporized. I see a trend...
And don't forget the Active Book, a 1990 era tablet running Smalltalk on an
ARM2. I worked on that one too, until the company was bought out by ATT and
closed down; an easy way to reduce competition for the very useless
PenPoint/Go/EO stuff.

Oh, and the Momenta, which ran a version of Digitalk ST/V on a X86 variant and
had poor battery life.

> 
> Tim, in your opinion, would this be worth trying one more time?

It's almost always trying again when the idea is a good one. 
> 
> If so, would it have to be started from scratch or is anything out there
> that could be reused/revived?
Knowledge mostly is reusable. Code rarely. There are a number of people with
experience of working on these things and a way to get them together with
funding to really tackle the problem would be needed. Clear aims are kinda
useful when hoping to make a product- exobox was the only place I ever worked
at with that part under control.

Whether it's really sensible to try to make Squeak be an OS is an interesting
argument. I suspect the answer these days is 'no' because one really doesn't
want to rewrite tcp/ip stacks if possible, just as one example.

tim
--
Tim Rowledge, tim at rowledge.org, http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: CSF: Charge to NSF