[Webteam] Welcome section of Front Page prior to 14Jan2007

[Brad Fuller]

<h1>Welcome!</h1>

When Smalltalk *was 
created>http://www.smalltalk.org/smalltalk/TheEarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk_Abstract.html* 
more than 35 years ago it <b>defined the term object orientation</b> and 
is the first language in which <b>everything is built from objects</b>. 
Smalltalk is deeply inspired by ideas from especially 
*Simula>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simula*, 
*Sketchpad>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad* and 
*Lisp>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_programming_language* and even 
today Smalltalk sets the bar for object oriented dynamically strongly 
typed interactive languages and environments.

You may be familiar with other open source languages like 
*Ruby>http://www.ruby-lang.org* or *Python>http://www.python.org*, but 
Squeak takes these concepts much, much further offering a true uniform 
fully reflective environment - real live objects.

<blockquote><i>
"The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution 
hasn't started yet. Don't be misled by the enormous flow of money into 
bad defacto standards for unsophisticated buyers using poor adaptations 
of incomplete ideas."
                                                     - Alan 
Kay</i></blockquote>

Our diverse and very active community includes teachers, students, 
business application developers, researchers, music performers, 
interactive media artists, web developers and many others.  We use 
Squeak for <b>a wide variety of computing tasks</b>, ranging from *child 
education>/Features/Education* to innovative 
*research>/Features/Research* in computer science, or creation of 
advanced dynamic web sites using the highly acclaimed continuation based 
*Seaside>http://www.seaside.st* framework.

The Squeak kernel sports:
- A largely Smalltalk-80 and ANSI Smalltalk X3J20 compatible 
*language>Smalltalk* and base libraries
- A fast *virtual machine>/Features/The Squeak VM* written in a subset 
of Squeak
- A bit identical compact 32-bit direct pointer object memory
- An efficient incremental hybrid generation scavenging mark and sweep 
garbage collector supporting bulk-mutation of objects
- A virtual machine plugin system with plugins for most parts outside 
the core like networking, file I/O, sound and graphics
- Bit-identical execution including graphics on all major computing 
platforms including most versions of Windows, MacOS and Unix/Linux, OS/2 
Warp and RiscOS. And if your platform wasn't included in that list, 
Squeak is easy to port.

On top of this there are class libraries and virtual machine plugins for 
*very advanced multimedia>/Features/ MultiMedia* including anti-aliased 
2D and accelerated 3D graphics, real-time sound and music synthesis, 
MPEG2 video and much more. In addition, Squeak has one of the *most 
advanced>/Features/Development* fully reflective development 
environments ever created with over *600 addon 
packages>http://map.squeak.org* available for single click download and 
installation.

The entire Squeak system is open source software, distributed freely 
with a *liberal license>SqueakLicense*.