[squeak-dev] would it be fun to implement Squeak (and SPOON!) on this hardware?

Jecel Assumpcao Jr. jecel at merlintec.com
Mon Dec 2 21:28:20 UTC 2013


Doug Jones wrote:
> What drew my attention to this project is its high level of openness. 
> Open source hardware, and open source software.  And it's reasonably 
> inexpensive.

I would call $10 "reasonably inexpensive", but at £25 it costs *exactly*
the same as the Model A of the Raspberry Pi. You get more I/Os, but
192KB of RAM instead of 256MB. But I do like the project.

One thing that would be interesting would be to combine Squeak with
Internet-0 (http://cba.mit.edu/events/04.09.I0/krikorian.pdf). In the
future we could have a $1 computer controlling your light with some
128KB for a headless Squeak image that you program from your desktop
machine.

As Jon Hylands wrote in another message in this thread, sometimes you
don't want a GUI and sometimes you don't want a Linux between your
language and your hardware. I find it amazing that some people running C
code on a 200MHz ARM can't toggle a pin at more than a few thousand
times per second. Having seen how much more usable the old Basic Stamp
boards (native development) were to most people than traditional
microcontroller programmed (cross) in assembly or C (even with a system
as nice as Arduino sketches), I agree with both of you that this is a
good direction to explore.

Tim Rowledge wrote:
> I did that back in 1987. Well, it was an ARM1, but still.

Was it really an ARM1 (BBC "tube" board) or an ARM2? In any case, you
did Smalltalk-80 and Jon asked about Little Smalltalk, which would be a
far simpler project..

-- Jecel



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