6 Jul
2012
6 Jul
'12
5:32 p.m.
Toby Thain wrote:
Jecel,
Then you will be aware that Apple themselves made several releases of a
mature Smalltalk-80 system for Macintosh. The project was led, at one
time, by Harvey Alcabes. I still have his business card in that role,
from when I met him at the Apple Developer Conference where HyperCard
(then codenamed Silver Surfer) was revealed.
I have the 400KB floppy disks of version 0.7 of that system. It actually
has two different images: "Level 0" is a single file and could run on a
Fat Mac while "Level 1" was split into several files which would have to
be joined on a Lisa hard drive and needed more than 512KB to run. At one
point Dan Ingalls needed a copy of this (though he had created it
originally, he had lost his copies) and I tried to go from 400KB MFS
disks to 1.4MB HFS disks (on a Macintosh Classic II) to 1.4MB FAT16
disks (on a Macintosh Performa 5215CD - don't ask me why that machine
refuses to read old Mac floppies or why the Classic II can't itself
understand FAT16 floppies) and then combine the files using a Mac
friendly format, like StuffIt. Somewhere along that path some bits got
damages (actually, the Level 0 floppy has bad blocks so I had only tried
the other 6 disks). Someone else had a copy and a simpler way to send
it, do Dan was able to add it to his "Smalltalk Zoo".
Lots of technical details about this system are available in the "green
book" ("Smalltalk-80, Bits of History, Words of Advice" edited by Glen
Krasner), which like many other classic Smalltalk books can be found for
free at
http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks.html
-- Jecel