[Webteam] Squeak History

Karl karl.ramberg at comhem.se
Mon May 21 16:59:22 UTC 2007


Dan Ingalls wrote:
>> I remember being told that the ST-76 image was cloned from the ST-72 
>> image by transferring the ST-72 objects (using VMWriter?). So my 
>> current squeak image is a direct descendant of ST-72 because there 
>> has been no start from scratch with an empty image.
>>
>> Not one of the cells I was born with 77 years ago exist today. Still 
>> -- I'm still me. By the same token, I believe Squeak as a living 
>> thing was born as the ST-72 image and is still going strong.
>>
>> Cheers
>> --Trygve
>
> Hi, Trygve -
>
> Your recollection (or your source) is close, but not quite accurate.
>
> We definitely used St-72 to build St-76, but it did not *become* St-76 
> the way St-76 became St-80 and St-80 became Squeak.  St-76 was a 
> complete departure from the past, and it was all written down as a set 
> of about 35 classes and 500 methods totalling about 20k of code.  I 
> wrote a compiler in St-72 that compiled that bootstrap into an object 
> memory, and that was then tested with the new bytecode VM in a debug 
> cycle until it worked.  It was not until a month or two later that Ted 
> got the first VMemWriter (now referred to as SystemTracer) to work, 
> and this has allowed us ever since to carry objects forward into the 
> future even across changes to the object memory.
>
> But don't let me spoil your story -- there are, in fact, a few objects 
> that survived even this step from St-72 to St-76, and these are the 
> cursors (at least their foreground bits).  Many have come and gone 
> since then, but I personally assembled the bits for the eyeglasses 
> cursor as octal numbers back in St-72.  A section in the St-76 
> bootstrap process copied the cursor bits out of the St-72 bootstrap 
> reader itself and into the new St-76 image, so these objects survived 
> in the VMemWriter sense from ST-72.
>
> Fun stuff
>
>         - Dan
Ugh, I changed the eyeglasses a while back to fit the hard coded 14 by 
14 cursor extent ! ( There is a 1 pixel inset border to make room for 
the white outline on cursors )! Ignorance is bliss...
Karl
> -----------------------------------------
>> On 19.05.2007 19:36, Alan Kay wrote:
>>> Dan and I have joked that there is probably at least one line of 
>>> code I wrote for class Paragraph still there. (I did the original 
>>> version in ST-72 -- a one -pager -- but it has been added to and 
>>> etc., many times since by others.)
>>>
>>> However, there is quite a bit of code still in Squeak from the 
>>> Smalltalk-80 release version that went to various companies, 
>>> including Apple before the Blue Book was written. And at least some 
>>> of that was in ST-76, the original version of which was pretty much 
>>> designed and written by Dan (the other three contributors for that 
>>> implementation were Ted Kaehler, Diana Merry, and Dave Robson). 
>>> Larry Tesler soon afterwards added the first of the code browsers, etc.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>>
>>> Alan
>>>
>>> At 10:09 AM 5/19/2007, Brad Fuller wrote:
>>>> subbukk wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> On Friday 18 May 2007 11:02 pm, Craig Latta wrote:
>>>>>  
>>>>>      
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> not forgetting of course that Squeak was announced in september(?)
>>>>>>> 96
>>>>>>>      
>>>>>>>          
>>>>>>
>>>>>>      midnight pacific time, 1 October 1996.
>>>>>>    
>>>>>>        
>>>>>
>>>>> Is the birth date of Squeak Virtual machine or the Squeak Image?
>>>>> Though Squeak
>>>>> was released in '96, some of the objects in its image must have been
>>>>> created
>>>>> long before that. Is there a way to find out the oldest extant 
>>>>> object in
>>>>> an
>>>>> image?
>>>>>  
>>>>>      
>>>> According to Dan's "Back to the Future"  article, the team started 
>>>> with an Apple Smalltalk-80 implementation which contained the image 
>>>> and VM. Maybe there is still some code from ST-80.
>>>>
>>>> brad
>>>
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>
>>>
>>>  
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> Trygve Reenskaug      mailto: trygver at ifi.uio.no 
>> <mailto:trygver at ifi.uio.no>
>> Morgedalsvn. 5A       http://folk.uio.no/trygver
>> N-0378 Oslo           Tel: (+47) 22 49 57 27
>> Norway
>>  
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>   




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