Luciano Notarfrancesco <lnotarfrancesco at yahoo.com> is claimed by the authorities to have written:

> Actually, we took exactly the opposite approach. Not
> the OSKit or Linux approach.
Urk? Now I'm confused; so where did I see stuff about using the OSKit to
support Squeak? Ah the joys of sen.... err what was I saying?

> We've implemented all the
> drivers in Squeak. We're handling interrupts (all of
> them, except the clock IRQ) in Squeak, via a Semaphore
> that is signaled in a generic IRQ handler in the VM.
> We've implemented drivers for the serial port,
> keyboard and PS/2 mouse. We have classes with names
> like PIC8259 (the Programmable Interrupt Controller),
> PCKeyboard, UART8250, UART16550, etc. This is crazy, I
> know, it's a lot of fun. It is great to be able to
> speak directly to the hardware objects from Squeak,
> sending them messages and making it crash sometimes :)
You bloomin' heroes. I am aghast. I am stunned. I wrote a serial port
driver in the old Acorn port of BrouHaHa Smalltalk many years ago that
could handle 9600 baud ok, but you folks have really gone crazy.
> 
> It's funny that you mention the project of writing a
> TCP/IP stack in Smalltalk from scratch. I've been
> doing exactly that in my spare time, and it works, or
> kind of (ARP, IP and UDP are working fine, and TCP is
> almost there, but with no fany stuff like delayed
> ACKs). We implemented SLIP over the UART8250 and were
> able to ping SqueakNOS from a Linux box.
Good grief. I mean, _good grief_. You're all certifiably, wonderfully,
insane. This is seriously neat stuff. Have you formed any ideas of how
much slower (or even faster?) your stack is than a 'normal' one?
> 
> But please don't compare this homegrown OS to the
> Interval SqueakOS. We're four or five persons (from
> Argentina) working on our spare time, and the last
> time we got together to do put some work on SqueakNOS
> was like 6 o 8 months ago.
The Interval project only had half-a-dozen software people for the OS
and applications but we were working full time. Well, aside from sushi
breaks and parties etc. I wish there were some way of getting you
somemoney to help with this - you guys down there need it even more than
I do, and I'm having to sell a house to keep eating.

I wonder if it could be put on anything I have lying around. Hmm,
NetWinder, netBook, trio pad, old Acorn prototype......

tim

-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Bug?  That's not a bug, that's a feature.       -T. John Wendel