Alan Kay Alan.Kay@squeakland.org is claimed by the authorities to have written:
Thanks Tim!
Hey, by the way, do you have any pix of the good old ActiveBook?
Hmm, oddly enough I was thinking about that this morning whilst walking the dog. Back in those days of course we didn't have digital cameras (in fact I think Fox Talbot had yet to invent photons at that point, and trains were still steam powered) so I have no convenient piccies. However, I _do_ still have a machine that used to run the hardware simulation I wrote. I have no idea if it still boots up, and it will be an interesting exercise to find a monitor it will talk to (remember, they used small insects running down small-bore hyperdermic tubes to ferry pixels in those days), but there is a faint chance it might be persuaded to work. Then we have to hope that the bits haven't rotted away.
Hmm, it looks like I have some very ancient floppy discs which claim to hold an archived ABC image, but in some format that requires a strange reader. And the old VM will not run on a current Acorn machine because the BitBlt is self compiling and assumes a complete absence of cache. The cache on a StrongARM is not an intersnooping type, so writing instructions through the data cache causes all sorts of fun. Wonder if the old VM source code would even compile? Perhaps I'll try it and see.
tim