[Webteam] 2nd Draft of About section

[Larry Trutter]

I will be putting the draft with links into the test site in a couple of 
days. Jason was able to give me access and I was able to login. Thanks, 
Jason!

Right now, the draft is in plain text format without links. Some contents of 
sections were rewritten or moved. So I took a chance in redoing a couple of 
sections so either it might be the right direction or  I probably went too 
far and should have left some sections alone. I tried to stay close to the 
vision provided by Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls (ie. The Future of Squeak).

Any constructive feedback, good or bad, is welcome.

Only the follow sections are not changed:
Squeak is free with a liberal license
Squeak Support
What it is not

2nd Draft:

About
Squeak is highly portable open-source Smalltalk with powerful multimedia 
facilities. Squeak is the vehicle of a wide range of projects, ranging from 
educational platforms to commercial web application development.

Other noteworthy aspects of Squeak include:

·	real-time sound and music synthesis written entirely in Smalltalk
·	extensions of BitBlt to handle color of any depth and anti-aliased image 
rotation and scaling
·	network access support that allows simple construction of servers and 
other useful facilities
·	bit-identical execution on many platforms (Windows, Mac, Unix, and others)
·	a compact object format that typically requires only a single word of 
overhead per object
·	a simple yet efficient incremental garbage collector for 32-bit direct 
pointers with efficient bulk-mutation of objects

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 Squeak?
Squeak is based on Smalltalk which was created more than 35 years ago. 
Smalltalk defined the term object orientation and is the first language in 
which everything is built from objects. Smalltalk is deeply inspired by 
ideas from Simula, Sketchpad and Lisp.

Even today, Smalltalk sets the bar for object oriented dynamically strongly 
typed interactive languages and environments. Unlike the standard static, 
file-based approach of other languages such as Ruby or Python, Squeak offers 
a true uniform fully reflective environment - real live objects. In this 
environment, when anyone can make a change to an object, its behavior 
changes immediately without having to restart the system. You can even 
modify or create objects while the application is running.

Squeak includes 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 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!).

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

Squeak stands alone as a practical computing environment 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.

Our diverse and very active community includes teachers, students, business 
application developers, researchers, music performers, interactive media 
artists, web developers and many others. Those individuals 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.

A Brief History of Squeak
Squeak began, very simply, with the needs of a research group at Apple. The 
goal was to build a system using a language as expressive and immediate as 
Smalltalk to pursue various application goals such as prototypical 
educational software, user interface experiments and another run at the 
Dynabook concept. 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.

Philosophy
The fundamental philosophy of Squeak is to write everything in Smalltalk. 
All of the source code in Squeak, including the virtual machine interpreter, 
is available to see, understand, modify, and extend for whatever purpose. It 
is a genuine, complete, compact, efficient and robust Smalltalk environment. 
Squeak’s 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.

Squeak is used as a computing tool for research on how computers can be used 
to enhance and amplify learning. Specifically, work in using computers to 
find new ways to reach children with powerful ideas of math and science.

Squeak provides a computer environment, such as Etoys, that help people 
learn ideas by building and playing around with them. Many meaningful and 
motivating projects helps them develop as logical thinkers, and understand 
how some technologies, that they encounter in their everyday lives, work. 
The Etoys tutorial illustrates an example of a learning environment where 
students increase their knowledge and wisdom by experimentation and 
experience rather than by the traditional, passive reception of lectures and 
limited feedback loops.


-Larry Trutter

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