Now that I've actually started to concentrate on Sphere somewhat with
reciently stabalized VM, I have made enough progress that I can lay out
a timetable for its development. 

Because a few people expressed an interest in either Sphere or squeak
running without an OS as well as other related topics, I hope this
posting will be of some use.


1. Design -- long DONE.
2. class bones in progress/largely done, available on my website: 

users.rcn.com/alangrimes/UCE/Sphere-Base.st << updated just today
(requires graph container class..) 

users.rcn.com/alangrimes/UCE/Sphere-Core.st 
users.rcn.com/alangrimes/UCE/Sphere-Devel.st << also updated. 


3. Sphere Demo version: in work 

	Morphical representation of Sphere with realtime visualizations of
sphere's basic operations, abstractions, and security mechanisms.
	A debugger customized for Sphere...

The goal being to demonstrate all of the essential features of Sphere
except the loading of user software. 


4. The completion of a fully functional valid sphere implementation
running on the bare Squeak VM. 
	-- the beginning of a colossaly major refactoring of the immage which
will likley end up as a fork of the system so that it can take full
advantage of Sphere's features.

5. adding multithreading to the VM so that Squeak-Sphere can function as
a reasonably high-performance guest operating system on some host
platform. 

-- hopefully I will have the means at this point to obtain some
reasonably decient RISC hardware...

6. the work necessary to make Squeak a full-fledged hardware-level
operating system capable of running spheres from either Sqeaktalk or any
binary immage.


-- 
Windows 3.11: Almost exactly 10 years old,
     and -400% slower than windows XP. ;) 

http://users.rcn.com/alangrimes/