Martin Kuball wrote:
Am Sunday, 23. October 2005 22:57 schrieb Alexandre Bergel:
My experience with Smalltalk is since 2.5 (Atari time :)
During oopsla, I was wondering with some couple of fellows from UCLA if there was a smalltalk on Atari ?
Cheers, Alexandre
Of course there was. A Smalltalk 80 port done by this company: http://www.heeg.de. I think they started selling it in 1988/1989.
Martin
I'm one of the people who did that port of the ParcPlace Smalltalk "PS" virtual machine (which was a JIT written in 68K assembly code, the precursor of the current VisualWorks engine). Another one you'll probably recognize is Michael Rüger... The Atari port was really nice - we had one of the few 4160ST machines (it was before the MegaST4 came out) and a big monitor (don't remember the name). Since there was no truly usable compiler environment, we set up a cross-compiling system where we compiled on a PCS (german UNIX workstation), linked with a crude libc which interfaced to TOS, and transferred the resulting executable via ZModem to the Atari :-) One colleague of mine (Adreas Tönne) did some MIDI sequencing with Smalltalk on an Atari, and we even got a version of The Analyst running - in 4MBytes! For printing, we provided primitives to interface to the Atari laser printer which had just a high-speed memory interface but no memory of its own. We converted the TeX fonts at 300dpi into StrikeFonts and just used the normal CharacterScanner rendering mechanism to fill a page form, and then called the prim to output it. The Atari had about 25-28% Dorado, which isn't exactly speedy but was enough to get a number of things going. Considering its price and the fact that Georg was able to convince ParcPlace that there would be a market for a 400DM student license, this was one of the first truly affordable Smalltalk machines for home users.
Cheers, Hans-Martin