Squeak's Birthday (Was Re: Adding a word to Squeak's object header)

Russell Allen russell.allen at firebirdmedia.com
Mon Aug 27 01:44:35 UTC 2001


"Rob Withers" <rwithers12 at mediaone.net> wrote:
> Speaking of which, Squeak, and more importantly it's community - all of you,
> continue to amaze and surprize me, after 1.5 years.  That reminds me, when
> is Squeak's birthday and how old is she?  We ought to have a birthday party.

Dan sent an email announcing Squeak to comp.lang.smalltalk on 01 Oct
1996, which by my reckoning means that we are coming up to Squeak's 5th
Birthday.

Russell

=================================================================================================

Message 1 in threadFrom: Dan Ingalls (Ingalls at Taurus.Apple.com)
Subject: Squeak - A Usable Smalltalk written in itself 
Newsgroups: comp.lang.smalltalk
View this article only
Date: 1996/10/01 


Dear Smalltalkers,

In order to foster collaboration with related groups in academia and 
industry, we have just made our software development environment 
available for download over the net.  Dubbed "Squeak" it consists 
largely of a reconditioned Smalltalk-80 system derived from Apple's 
earlier ST-80 release, along with an interpreter that runs on the 
PowerPC and most other 68020 or later Macs (but read on...)

The implementation is notable in that it is almost entirely written in 
Smalltalk.  We began with the Blue Book spec to which we added a 
32-bit direct pointer ObjectMemory with incremental compacting garbage 
collection.  While getting this to run and converting the image, we 
wrote a translator  from a Smaltalk subset (roughly the subset used 
for the Blue Book spec) to C.  After some tuning this has produced a 
very usable system.  In addition, we have extended BitBlt to color, 
added a reasonably portable file system, and we have also included 
rudimentary support for polyphonic multitimbral music synthesis.

The entire system, including the interpreter written in Smalltalk, and 
the translator that produced its interpreter, is now available to the 
outside world.  You can find it all beginning with the page

        www.Research.Apple.com/Research/proj/

Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on "Squeak".  Or you can go 
direct to our actual page:
        
http://www.research.apple.com/research/proj/learning_concepts/squeak/
 
There is almost no documentation, but those familiar with Smalltalk-80 
should have no trouble putting it to use.  Squeak is a work in 
progress.  If we had waited to get clean and well-documented, it would 
not be available now.  We welcome any contributions from the outside, 
such as animation, 3D, music, and ports to other platforms.

Please do not reply directly to me or other members of the project.  
Use the mail address given on our page (squeak at Research.Apple.com), 
and we will do our best to answer reasonable queries.

Enjoy

        - Dan Ingalls




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