Hey Squeakers,

> At 10:30 AM 3/17/2003 -0800, Tim Rowledge wrote:
> > > Just curious:
> > > How much RAM did that system have and roughly how many classes did the
> > > image have you were working with?

	And Allen Wirfs-Brock replied:
> >Almost none and very few. The Magnolia was a predecessor of the
> >commercial 4404 which had a massive 1Mb of ram. And a stunningly fast
> >8MHz 68000 cpu.
>

	While reflecting on the early days of Smalltalk, let's not forget the
contribution of the San Diego-based Levco company -- Duane 'Squeaky' Maxwell
being among the intrepid band of engineers who worked magic showing Apple
the way. The Levco Prodigy 4 was a ground-breaking, price-busting machine on
many levels.

	Here is a page with pictures of our original Fat Mac and SE-based
Prodigies:

	http://squirrelfeeders.com/comic_strip_factory.html

	A 16 MHz 68020, with a math coprocessor, 4 MB of contiguous RAM (man, we
thought we were flying when the most memory we had in our Fat Mac prior to
the Prodigy was 512K!)... and the first commercial SCSI hard drive interface
(our first Prodigy had a whooping 10 MB INTERNAL hard drive... that's right,
the Levco guys figured out how to safely and effectively fit the Prodigy
daughterboard AND a 'chimney-based' internal hard drive into the original
Mac case!)... This was truly an amazing and groundbreaking machine.

	The capper was when you connected an eMachines (I think this was the first
big screen to work with a Prodigy) large-monitor to a Prodigy. For all
intents and purposes, this created a Mac-based workstation that was an order
of magnitude cheaper than similarly powerful workstations at the time. (The
original Prodigy boards were $10,000! Expensive by today's standards, but
super cheap when you figure what they were comparable to when compared to
scientific and engineering workstations.)

	A minor tweak of the Apple Smalltalk display classes was all that was
needed to get Smalltalk SCREAMING on a Prodigy.

	I clearly remember the day that Timlynn and I made an appointment to visit
the Xerox Pasadena research lab (the 'southern cousin' of PARC) and we had a
chance to show them a Prodigy in action. Until that time, Xerox thought Macs
were 'silly toys'. We put the Prodigy under a draped table with the
eMachines monitor, keyboard and mouse on top. We ran Xerox's HUMBLE expert
system and some Smalltalk benchmark programs and BLEW THEIR SOX OFF! The
Prodigy was faster than their Dorado and whatever their commercial Smalltalk
workstations at the time were.

	When we lifted the drape and showed them the Mac below, they nearly
fainted! :-)

	Needless to say, Xerox's opinion of Macs changed after this experience.

	Somewhere in my (physical) photo archive, I have a picture of the big
screen Levco Prodigy 4 running Apple Smalltalk. If I come across it, I'll
add it to the page above.

	Smalltalk on a Levco Prodigy was awesome and is a pleasant memory whenever
recalled.

	Best Regards,
	Jim on behalf of
	--Timlynn and Jim--
	Founders and Research Directors
	 Sohodojo - 'War College' of the Small Is Good Business Revolution
		http://sohodojo.com
	Director and Entrepreneur/Futurist In Residence
	 NARFI - North American Rural Futures Institute
		http://narfi.org


Jim Salmons and Timlynn Babitsky
______________________________________________
   JFS Consulting, our Portfolio Life nanocorp
   http://jfsconsulting.com