On Wednesday 19 November 2003 13:38, mayureshkathe at softhome.net wrote:
> Bruce ONeel <edoneel at sdf.lonestar.org> wrote:
> > As one of those lisp machine fanatics I sure wouldn't mind a
>
> Where on the web can I take a look at a lisp machine?

Brian already gave you a good link, but I can't resist commenting that 
you can't download a "machine" over the internet. You have to either 
personally go somewhere where they have a working model or find a movie 
of one in action. Unfortunately, doing a search in the video part of 
Altavista didn't get me any results.

> > If someone could write a *good* file system in squeak and a
> > good TCP/IP stack then SqueakOS would be possible on a limited
> > set of hardware.  It is worth remembering that existing

I would prefer a good persistent object store to a file system, though 
of course these would be needed for dealing with older machines. Just 
like you can read and write to a FAT partition on a machine that you 
booted with a Knoppix Linux CD-ROM, for example.

In fact, I would group this with the web browser, email, text editor and 
spreadsheet as "necessary but not sufficient" applications. Having 
these things doesn't really help, but not having them hurt very much 
indeed.

> There was a Squeak Machine built, just that it was never taken into
> production.
> The economics never made it a feasible idea.

The machines I am aware of are:

  - Exobox http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/2486
  - Interval Research
  - Curtis Wickman's port of Squeak to a bare Mitsubishi M32 chip
  - STC Hyperstone prototype http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/1836

And these adaptations should probably count as well:

  - Disney Parks PDA (present at OOPSLA 2003)
  - Dan's Squeak PC http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/3502

My impression is that economics was not the most important factor in why 
we can't buy any of these.

> How many people would buy a SqueakMachine?
> Lets suppose I build a SqueakMachine, how many people on this list
> would be interested?

As I mentioned in another message in this thread, I am building a 
Smalltalk Machine (running what I called "Neo Smalltalk" as the kernel 
language, but the idea is to have Squeak on top of that) and would be 
happy to collaborate with people interested in this.

It is a very open project - any lack of information is not due to 
secrets but only my limited time to keep web pages updated.

-- Jecel