Putting squeak in business.

John M McIntosh johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com
Mon Nov 17 18:17:25 UTC 2003


On Nov 17, 2003, at 8:35 AM, Lex Spoon wrote:

> Alan Grimes <alangrimes at starpower.net> wrote:
>> My own experience with squeak is that it only needs a decient
>> web-browser and a usable word-processor as well as a few layout fixups
>> to be ready for prime-time...
>
> This doesn't sound quite as crazy as people are making it out.  You
> would have to be very very careful, though, about what gets  
> implemented.
>  It's widely suggested that the vast bulk of features in Word, Excell,
> and, dare I say, Mozilla, are not necessary.  If you relentlessly focus
> on what is necessary to make a useful home computer, you could do it
> with a dozen programmers and a year or two's effort, as an optimistic
> estimate.  You would certainly not want to go down the list at w3.org
> and implement every TLA they have, but you could do HTML 4 and style
> sheets and JavaScript.

This does remind me of my discussions with Jecel Assumpcao Jr  
<jecel at merlintec.com>
and his work with his FGPA computer in South America.

http://wiki.cs.uiuc.edu/CampSmalltalk/OOPSLA+2003+Trip+report+Tuesday
NeoSmalltalk

Yes he needs a browser too, but since his market is so targeted, a  
certain socio-economic group, in Brazil and things like the Brazil  
wanting to move away from Microsoft  
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20031116/D7URSKHO0.html then doing  
something like having web pages designed with a subset of HTML that the  
NeoSmalltalk  computer understands and implements is I think doable.  
Certainly for folks who want to target that market.

However this won't fly in the usa because of microsoft browser feature  
lockout...

PS didn't Exobox work in this problem space? Surely someone could share  
a cost estimate from that project?

> --
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John M. McIntosh <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com> 1-800-477-2659
Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd.  http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com
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