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

Jecel Assumpcao Jr. jecel at merlintec.com
Tue Dec 3 19:51:16 UTC 2013


Doug Jones wrote:

> True, but comparing with the Raspberry Pi isn't really fair ;-)

It is unfair from the seller's viewpoint, but totally fair from the
buyer's viewpoint. Note that I develop such boards and so am very
familiar with the issues you mentioned. If I try to buy the Zynq 7020
chip present in the $99 Parallela board, for example, Xilinx wants me to
pay $150. And the fact that I am using FPGAs to implement my Smalltalk
processors while these ARM SoCs are full ASICs make it hard to compete.
But as a buyer you shouldn't have to care about any of that.

Since you are interested in open source, you might find these boards
interesting:

https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/open-source-hardware

About the 128KB Macintosh, I had one for a couple of months. MacWrite
was limited to at most 7 pages while Word swapped like crazy. I opened
it up and expanded it to 512KB and it went from being an interesting toy
to a usable tool.

> The first Mac was inspired by that legendary visit to Xerox PARC.  They 
> saw a GUI there.  And Alan Kay showed them Smalltalk.

Not quite, though this is the most popular version of the story. Jef
Raskin worked on the idea of a graphical computer that would be
user-friendly for his PhD project which he called "QuickDraw". After he
became a professor, he spent some time at Xerox PARC as a visiting
researcher and became very familiar with all the projects being
developed there. After that he joined Apple to write their manuals and
was later tasked with creating "Annie", a very low cost game machine. He
renamed it Macintosh and proposed to combine his QuickDraw ideas with a
"computer as an appliance" design to avoid the complications he had
faced trying to document the very flexible Apple II.

http://www.digibarn.com/friends/jef-raskin/writings/millions.html

Steve Jobs didn't like the project and kept trying to kill it. Jef felt
that if Steve could see the stuff at PARC he would leave him alone. Mike
Markkula agreed and sent Steve (and, later, the Lisa team) to see a demo
of the Alto by Adele Goldberg and Dan Ingalls.

-- Jecel



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