[Vm-dev] Squeak/Pharo VM fork history

[tim Rowledge]

> On 2020-05-18, at 7:37 AM, K K Subbu <kksubbu.ml at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On 18/05/20 5:00 pm, karl ramberg wrote:
>> Squeak was made on MacOS 7, 8 or 9 before Apple used Unix.
> 
> Thank you for the correction. AFAIK, the first releases were on MacOS System 7.0 (68020 or PPC). Ian's Unix ports and Andreas Raab's Wintel port followed pretty quickly - a tribute to Squeak's portability.

I'm not absolutely certain, but I think Andreas' Windows port was the first to appear. Ian wasn't far behind with the basic unix stuff and then I was allowed to release my RISC OS port (done on Interval Research time) shortly after; I also had to do a little-endian BitBlt and some rather complicated filing system trickery. We also (Interval) had a proprietary bit of hardware based on the same StrongARM cpu as my RISC OS machine, another in the long list of ARM powered Smalltalk based tablet machines I've worked on over the decades.

Remember - this was  1996, well before Apple released OS X to general use. Mac OS, Windows and RISC OS were co-operative multi-tasking GUIs. Ethernet cards were expensive options for most machines. WiFi was a several hundred dollar add-on and I don't think anyone anticipated it ever being practical in anything like a $2 ESP8266 board. I don't think we got any socket support into the system until around v1.20

The original build 'system' involved much of the source code being in the very early and very primitive slang-C held in the main image along with the plain C code for the Mac version kept as huge literal strings. We ran the code generator methods to produce the transliterated text and dump those literal strings into files. Then very platform specific hacks were performed to actually compile the C code. Gradually we tidied that up a bit but it wasn't until I made the first VMMaker package in '01 that things started to get more organised for the platform spread. Once Ian, John, Andreas & I were all using it, VMMaker became the standard.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
If you must choose between two evils, pick the one you've never tried before.