[Vm-dev] Squeak/Pharo VM fork history

Juan Vuletich JuanVuletich at zoho.com
Tue May 19 00:11:43 UTC 2020


On 5/18/2020 1:55 PM, tim Rowledge wrote:
>
>
>
>> On 2020-05-18, at 9:47 AM, David T. Lewis<lewis at mail.msen.com>  wrote:
>>
>> It is worth remembering that Juan Vuletich did an OS/2 port back in
>> that general time frame.
>>
>>   https://www.jvuletich.org/Squeak/SqueakForOS2/SqueakForOS2Eng.html
>>
>> I wouldn't be surprised if it still works. But this was never part
>> of the official releases.
> Hunh - I didn't remember that at all; I thought Boris Shingarov had been Mr OS/2-Squeak. Ah - http://www.edm2.com/index.php/Squeak
>
> OS/2 was ... interesting. I used it for some time at ParcPlace in order to help test the VW port. Some really neat ideas and some truly awful implementation issues made it not the most pleasant OS to use.
>
> tim
> --
> tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
> What passes for common sense is always revisable
>
>
>
>

Thanks Dave for remembering!

http://www.edm2.com/index.php/Squeak is correct.

Boris' work was essentially a recompilation of Ian's Unix VM using 
XFree86, not really a new port. It required the user to install XFree86 
on their OS/2 system in order to use the VM. Later this was the base of 
his extremely interesting Cheese project. Boris is still around in the 
community, building great stuff. He is also a good friend of mine.

I independently wrote a new port of the VM platform support code, 
specifically for OS/2. It didn't require any installation of additional 
software, and it was a regular OS/2 program.

When I did it, Andreas' Windows VM still wasn't able to use DirectX or 
OpenGL, and display update was rather slow, so a "defer display update" 
option was included in the VM. My OS/2 VM used DIVE, a game API, sort of 
OS/2 version of DirectX. Display updates were much faster, no need to 
defer updates. This was important in 486 class machines. It also used 
DART for low latency audio. I was so into this project that spent about 
half a month salary on the rather expensive VisualAge C++ C compiler.

This was in the Windows 95 time. Running my VM on OS/2 3.0 or 4.0 was a 
much better experience than suffering Windows 95.

Unfortunately OS/2 failed in the market, and later Windows 2000 and 
Windows XP were for the first time more reliable than OS/2. People 
abandoned OS/2 en masse. Around that time, Andreas wrote support for 
OpenGL and DirectX in the Windows VM, making display updates fast too. 
At some time, I saw no point in pushing for OS/2, and started using 
Windows XP and Andreas' Windows VM too.

It was a lot of fun.

Cheers,

-- 
Juan Vuletich
www.cuis-smalltalk.org
https://github.com/Cuis-Smalltalk/Cuis-Smalltalk-Dev
https://github.com/jvuletich
https://www.linkedin.com/in/juan-vuletich-75611b3
@JuanVuletich



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