Martin Kuball wrote:

>Am Sunday, 23. October 2005 22:57 schrieb Alexandre Bergel:
>  
>
>>>My experience with Smalltalk is since 2.5 (Atari time :)
>>>      
>>>
>>During oopsla, I was wondering with some couple of fellows from
>>UCLA if there was a smalltalk on Atari ?
>>
>>Cheers,
>>Alexandre
>>    
>>
>
>Of course there was. A Smalltalk 80 port done by this company:  
>http://www.heeg.de. I think they started selling it in 1988/1989.
>
>Martin
>  
>
I'm one of the people who did that port of the ParcPlace Smalltalk "PS" 
virtual machine (which was a JIT written in 68K assembly code, the 
precursor of the current VisualWorks engine). Another one you'll 
probably recognize is Michael Rüger...
The Atari port was really nice - we had one of the few 4160ST machines 
(it was before the MegaST4 came out) and a big monitor (don't remember 
the name). Since there was no truly usable compiler environment, we set 
up a cross-compiling system where we compiled on a PCS (german UNIX 
workstation), linked with a crude libc which interfaced to TOS, and 
transferred the resulting executable via ZModem to the Atari :-)
One colleague of mine (Adreas Tönne) did some MIDI sequencing with 
Smalltalk on an Atari, and we even got a version of The Analyst running 
- in 4MBytes!
For printing, we provided primitives to interface to the Atari laser 
printer which had just a high-speed memory interface but no memory of 
its own. We converted the TeX fonts at 300dpi into StrikeFonts and just 
used the normal CharacterScanner rendering mechanism to fill a page 
form, and then called the prim to output it.
The Atari had about 25-28% Dorado, which isn't exactly speedy but was 
enough to get a number of things going. Considering its price and the 
fact that Georg was able to convince ParcPlace that there would be a 
market for a 400DM student license, this was one of the first truly 
affordable Smalltalk machines for home users.

Cheers,
Hans-Martin