On Wed, Feb 05, 2020 at 05:52:19PM -0800, tim Rowledge wrote:
> A look back at ancient email records shows that the initial stuff for an event based (but not event/interrupt driven) input system was sometihng I started in June 2000 (wholly khao!) and then argued over with Andreas for a couple of months (as we always did). It was definitely of the era of cooperative multitasking via GUI calls for most machines.
> 
> I don't have all the emails from then and the archive on forumworld.st only goes back to 2006; does anyone know of a complete archive? Looking at june 2000 for mails with subjects like 'events and morphic' should help.
> 

Our archives on http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/
provide a history of most of the early squeak-dev email traffic going back
to maybe late 1997 or so. Some of the email time stamps are suspect, but
there is quite a bit there, so you may be able to browse through that
site and find some things of interest.

Some of us (including me) probably have private copies of much of the early
list emails, but the http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/
would be the best place to start looking.

Ian Piumarta could probably clarify the details wrt design intent,
although I don't know how to reach him at the moment.

To some extent, the design intent is self evident. The sensor uses
a SharedQueue to deliver events to the image, and the VM somehow
populates the queue without any knowledge of how the events are to
be consumed from the queue.

Twenty years ago we had platform restrictions, but nowadays your
cell phone knows how to do multitasking and event handling. All
that we need to do today is figure out how to cause events from
the VM (SqueakJS or compiled VM) to be pushed into the sensor's
event queue. It's OK to keep an event tickler process as an extra
safety net, but in theory this should not even be needed.

Long ago this stuff was difficult. Today, maybe not so much. I
guess let's try it and find out.

Dave