Looking for old Smalltalks for DOS

Jecel Assumpcao Jr jecel at merlintec.com
Mon Feb 26 18:04:09 UTC 2007


Steve Burbeck wrote on Sat, 24 Feb 2007 13:43:00 -0500
> Yes, I do have a Methods distribution from 1985 complete with manual, two
> floppies and the license.  It is an interesting historical note that Digitalk license
> protected the binary interpreter but gave essentially unlimited rights to the
> Smalltalk Source Code including rights to distribute, sell, license, lease or loan
> them as you wish!  So, anyone who wishes to reimplement the interpreter is
> home free.  I would guess that it wouldn't be a huge task to repurpose the Squeak
> interpreter to run Methods.  But with Squeak available, who would bother?

Though very off topic for this list, I have an interesting story related
to this. I was building a 68000 based Smalltalk computer when Smalltalk
V/286 came out with exactly the same license you described. This was
before ParcPlace so Digitalk's Smalltalks were the only ones that
mattered. Though it would have been pretty easy for me and the
programmer who worked for me to build our own image from scratch just
following the Blue Book the result wouldn't be entirely compatible with
Smalltalk V and I felt this would be *really* bad for the future of the
language.

So I exchanged some emails with Digitalk's Jim Anderson and then called
him (if the emails were rather expensive for me at the time, an
international phone call from Brazil was absurdly so) to propose that he
let me distribute their image and sources with my machine. I would write
my own virtual machine so Digitalk would have no costs at all and I was
willing to pay some royalties. Note that through their license Digitalk
had already given me permission to do what I wanted without paying them
anything at all! But just because it would have been legal, I didn't
think it would have been nice to do so without asking.

Jim expressed his doubts that I could do what I proposed and said he
would think about it. I am still waiting for his final reply :-)

A couple of years later Digitalk did come out with a 68000 based
product, Smalltalk V/Mac. And much later I found out about other similar
projects they had with some academic and industrial partners at the
time. So he might have felt there would have been some conflicts (my
original impression that they were going to focus exclusively on the PC
was wrong). I think they weren't very serious in their license and
didn't expect anybody to actually copy the other parts without their
virtual machine.

-- Jecel



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