Tek Magnolia (Was: 1970s microprocessor magazine articles) - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

7 Jun 2012

...
  > 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. 
I think that my memory has failed me.  I think it was more like sometime
in the early 1980's, now that I think more about it.  Magnolia used a
68000 CPU (two of them, I think...because I believe it supported demand
paging, which the 68000 didn't support directly), which didn't exist in
'76.  Smalltalk existed, but the Smalltalk-76 release would have been a
major pain to port to the 68000.  Also, the machine used a Micropolis 8"
hard disk (1200-series)  that didn't come around until sometime in
mid-'78 or so.  So, though my memory tells me that I saw this machine
running in a lab before I went to work at Tektronix in June of '77, my
mind has to be suffering from wetware bitrot - something I'm becoming
more and more familiar with as the years go by :-(

In any case, the sad part is that it appears at least from a historical
standpoint that a lot of information about Magnolia (along with other
Tektronix forays into computer systems) are being lost to time.

Rick Bensene