Rick Bensene wrote about Tektronix stuff:
ranging from the amazing Magnolia Smalltalk
Workstation from
1976-ish,
Really? That date is extremely hard to believe.
Adele Goldberg wrote in "The Smalltalk-80 System Release Process" (in
_Smalltalk-80: Bits of History, Words of Advice_, June 1983) that the
first release of Smalltalk to licensees (Apple, DEC, HP, and Tektronix)
did not occur until February 17, 1981, with updated releases on July 24,
1981 and November 18, 1981. "Implementing the Smalltalk-80 System: The
Tektronix Experience" by Paul L. McCullough, copyright 1982 and printed
in the same book, describes the initial bringup at Tektronix. It
doesn't give a date for the start of the effort, but after describing
the initial bringup, states "About this time, we received the second
virtual image from Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)." This
suggests that they received the first and second images at times
consistent with the release dates in the Goldberg paper.
Didn't Magnolia use the Motorola MC68000 microprocessor? Motorola
didn't announce that until September 1979, and while it's certainly
possible that Motorola provided Tektronix with preliminary data on it
prior to that, Motorola didn't have working silicon until late 1979.
Allen Wirfs-Brock's resume describes how he was involved in the
Tektronix review of the draft Smalltalk-80 books in 1980-1981, and that
review occurred before Xerox released the image.