Smalltalk for z80 processor

Alan Kay Alan.Kay at disney.com
Sat Nov 20 16:34:21 UTC 1999


FYI --

This was an excellent "redesign" and implementation of Smalltalk-72. I.e.
instead of being slavish to what we had done at PARC and making a literal
copy, they came up with a very interesting set of improvements to ST-72,
most of which really helped the end user. The Exidy (Z80) wasn't up to the
bitmap graphics that the Alto could do, but nonetheless, this system was
fun to contemplate ... There were several papers written by these folks ...

Cheers,

Alan

--------

At 8:12 AM -0800 11/20/99, Helge Horch wrote:
>At 12:14 20.11.99 -0300, Alejandro F. Reimondo wrote:
>>Has anyone implemented an Smalltalk VM on z80 (8bits) processors ?
>
>Scott Warren and Dennis Abbe at Rosetta did, about twenty years ago:
>
><http://www.rosetta.com/RosettaFAQ.html#are-smalltalk>
>
>There's a description of the system in the ACM SIGSMALL magazine, Vol. 5,
>#2 of October 1979, pp. 36-45. The language itself was neither -72 nor -76,
>but "related".
>
>Judging from the pictures, Rosetta(tm) Smalltalk offered a windowed
>(character-oriented), conversational environment (command line window, file
>list, text editor, debugger) on the Exidy Sorcerer and equivalent machines
>of the time. They say the system took 12k of machine code plus 4k of
>predefined objects, leaving the rest for the workspace.
>
>HTH,
>Helge





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