[Webteam] Feedback for "About" page integration

[Larry Trutter]

Here is the first draft of my attempt to integrate two different "About" 
page into one. I don't have access to the test web page so I post the text 
here. I did not make any attempt to rewrite the whole thing. So I have been 
conservative with the changes.

If any of the information is out of date, let me know and I can update it. 
There are several sections that I did not modify so I did not include those 
texts.

So any feedback on this are welcome.

thanks,
Larry Trutter


The following sections were left intact:
  About
  What it is not
  A Brief History of Squeak
  Squeak is Free, with a Liberal License
  Squeak Support

The following sections are changed/integrated:

What is Squeak?
When Smalltalk was created more than 35 years ago it defined the term object 
orientation and is the first language in which everything is built from 
objects. Smalltalk is deeply inspired by ideas from especially Simula, 
Sketchpad and Lisp 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 or Python, 
but Squeak takes these concepts much, much further offering a true uniform 
fully reflective environment - real live objects.

The Squeak kernel includes:
·	A largely Smalltalk-80 and ANSI Smalltalk X3J20 compatible language and 
base libraries
·	A fast virtual machine 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 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 fully reflective development 
environments ever created with over 600 addon packages available for single 
click download and installation.

Squeak is available for free via the Internet, at this and other sites. Each 
release includes platform-independent support for color, sound, and network 
access, with complete source code.
Originally developed on the Macintosh, members of its user community have 
since ported it to numerous other platforms including Windows NT, XP Windows 
CE (it runs on the Cassiopeia and the HP320LX), all common flavors of UNIX, 
Acorn RiscOS, and a bare chip (the Mitsubishi M32R/D).


What is Cool about Squeak
"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

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 a wide variety of 
computing tasks, ranging from child education to innovative research in 
computer science, or creation of advanced dynamic web sites using the highly 
acclaimed continuation based Seaside framework.

Squeak extends the fundamental Smalltalk philosophy of complete openness -- 
where everything is available to see, understand, modify, and extend for 
whatever purpose -- to include even the VM. It is a genuine, complete, 
compact, efficient and robust Smalltalk environment. It is not specialized 
for any particular hardware/OS platform. Porting is easy -- you are not 
fighting entrenched platform/OS dependencies to move to a new system or 
configuration. It has essentially been put into the public domain - greatly 
broadening potential interest, and potential applications. The core team 
behind Squeak includes Dan Ingalls, Alan Kay, Ted Kaehler, and Scott 
Wallace. All of this has attracted many of the best and most experienced 
Smalltalk programmers and implementers in the world.
Squeak stands alone as a practical Smalltalk in which a developer, 
researcher, professor, or motivated student can examine source code for 
every part of the system, including graphics primitives and the virtual 
machine itself. One can make changes immediately and without needing to see 
or deal with any language other than Smalltalk.

Squeak runs bit-identical images across its entire portability base, greatly 
facilitating collaboration in diverse environments. Any image file will run 
on any interpreter even if it was saved on completely different hardware, 
with a completely different OS (or no OS at all!).


Philosophy
Squeak is an open, highly-portable Smalltalk implementation whose virtual 
machine is written entirely in Smalltalk, making it easy to debug, analyze, 
and change. To achieve practical performance, a translator produces an 
equivalent C program whose performance is comparable to commercial 
Smalltalks.

The current Squeak interpreter combines a classical Smalltalk bytecode 
interpreter with a simple yet efficient 32-bit direct-pointer object memory 
and incremental garbage collector. It also includes a BitBlt graphics system 
that supports 1-, 2-, 4-, and 8-bit indexed colors, as well as 16- and 
32-bit RGB colors, together with a "warp drive" that supports fast rotations 
and other affine transformations, as well as simple anti-aliasing. Other 
notable (and equally portable) capabilities of Squeak include 16-bit sound 
input and output, and support for sockets and general network access.

The portability and sharability of Squeak, together with its malleability 
(since it is all in Smalltalk, a competent Smalltalker can change anything 
about it), has given rise to a lot of interest in the academic community, 
and what one might call the "independent" computer science community. By 
this phrase we mean to include people who are not so interested in one 
language over another, or one OS over another, but who have their own 
particular passion (numerical analysis, graphics, distributed computing, 
music synthesis, O-O education, etc) and who want a system that can provide 
the most flexible and immediate command over experiments in their field of 
interest.

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