18 Oct
1998
18 Oct
'98
5:37 p.m.
I just went through a pile of stuff in the storage room I use for an office,
and found the following (which the boss is letting me keep):
- complete set of manuals for Lisa OS and 7/7 apps!!!
- complete set of original 7/7 disks
- Smalltalk pre-beta release version 0.3 for the Mac (is this a port of the
Smalltalk that ran on the Xerox PARC? I'm pretty ignorant about that.)
- Manuals for Lisa Pascal Workshop
- MacWorks manuals
- assorted diskettes of old Mac/Lisa stuff
Today was a happy day.
-- MB
18 Oct
18 Oct
8:24 p.m.
New subject: Smalltalk (was Re: Treasure chest!)
I just went through a pile of stuff in the storage
room I use for an office,
and found the following (which the boss is letting me keep):
[...]
- Smalltalk pre-beta release version 0.3 for the Mac
(is this a port of the
Smalltalk that ran on the Xerox PARC? I'm pretty ignorant about that.)
Well, I've been playing with Smalltalk. (I have the "Blue Book" checked
out
of the library right now.) I've been reading about the history of Smalltalk
too. It could be a port. Xerox wanted to commercialize Smalltalk, so they
selected four companies -- Apple, Digital, HP, and Tektronix. Each company
would help with Xerox' book editing -- writing documentation is always a lot
of work :) -- and would be able to port Smalltalk to their respective work-
stations or computers.
Describe the disks. Do they have a date? Is the label homemade or not?
What are the files on them? (I don't think I would RUN those files without
making a copy, though.)
BTW, someone mentioned that he had a Tektronix Magnolia. This was one of
Tek's workstations of the 80's, and Tek's share of the porting effort was to
put Smalltalk on the Magnolia. I would definitely like to find out more
about THAT machine.
Also, a few years ago Apple wrote a research version of Smalltalk called
Squeak. They dropped it (as they tend to do) but Disney took it over. It's
freely available. It may be a descendant of Apple's experience with Xerox
since it seems to include much of the original Xerox code. See
http://www.create.ucsb.edu/squeak/
http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak.1
But I'd still love to play with one of the oroginal 80's implementaions!
-- Derek
19 Oct
19 Oct
9:21 a.m.
New subject: Smalltalk (was Re: Treasure chest!)
D. Peschel" <dpeschel(a)u.washington.edu> wrote:
BTW, someone mentioned that he had a Tektronix
Magnolia. This was one of
Tek's workstations of the 80's, and Tek's share of the porting effort was to
put Smalltalk on the Magnolia. I would definitely like to find out more
about THAT machine.
I'm not sure which machine the Magnolia is.
I've got a Tek 4406. The 4405 and 4406 were 68020-based version of the
earlier Tek 4404 (68010) workstation, which was intended for AI applications.
Tek offered Smalltalk and LISP.
Originally the 440x machines ran a Unix clone (Coherent?). But later they
switched to UTek, their own port of BSD 4.1. UTek requires a newer boot
rom, though the new rom can boot the old OS as well.
I don't have the LISP, but the Smalltalk is definitely based on the Xerox
ST80 image with some Tek improvements. And of course Tek wrote their
own virtual machine to run it.
The 440x have a SCSI interface to an external box containing SCSI-to-floppy
and SCSI-to-ST506 bridges. The SCSI-to-floppy bridge was actually
developed by Tek, although I've heard that some of the OEM bridges will
work. Unfortunately mine is broken.
I'm using an 88M Syquest in place of the original hard drive.
Since UTek is based on BSD 4.1, it doesn't understand IP subnetting.
Fortunately I have a router that can be configured to proxy ARP for
addresses outside the local subnet.
Cheers,
Eric
1:13 p.m.
New subject: Smalltalk (was Re: Treasure chest!)
D. Peschel" <dpeschel(a)u.washington.edu>
wrote:
Well, I checked my saved messages again.
The person is Innfogra(a)aol.com, and his message did mention a Magnolia, but
it was one of the machines he had *scrapped*, not *kept*. Damn!
BTW, you said you were looking for original Xerox stuff. I read that the
University of Washington got the source code to PS (which was one of Xerox'
several implementations of Smalltalk, I think pre-Smalltalk-80, with a 68000
cross-development environment). I doubt we have it anymore. Alan Borning,
who is a professor here, doubted it also. But I'll keep looking.
And I know we had/have some Xerox Stars (?) on campus... I never got a log-in
name, so I never used them. The last time I saw them they had "Out of Order"
signs on them, which I think was a naked lie to cover up the fact that the
people had no idea what to do with them.
Note that Smalltalk was never offered on the Star. Xerox may have written it
for the bare processor (though I don't think so). They DID try to write it in
Mesa, running on top of the usual Star system, and it ran like molasses.
So that never saw the light of day. (The trivia in these Smalltalk messages
came from a new 4-volume "Handbook of Programming Languages" (I think
that's
what the set is called). Fascinating books.)
I was never a person for .sig's because I could never think of an original
quote and didn't want to rip off an over-ripped-off unoriginal quote. But I
think that "God damn entropy" is going to be my motto for a while.
-- Derek
BTW, someone mentioned that he had a Tektronix
Magnolia. This was one of
Tek's workstations of the 80's, and Tek's share of the porting effort was to
put Smalltalk on the Magnolia. I would definitely like to find out more
about THAT machine.
I'm not sure which machine the Magnolia is.
9:13 a.m.
Marion Bates <Marion.Bates(a)Dartmouth.EDU> wrote:
- Smalltalk pre-beta release version 0.3 for the Mac
(is this a port of the
Smalltalk that ran on the Xerox PARC? I'm pretty ignorant about that.)
Yes, but it's been pretty heavily "Macified".
I'm still looking for a copies of any of the SmallTalk-80 release tapes
that Xerox provided their licensees.
9563
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dpeschel＠u.washington.edu -
eric＠brouhaha.com -
Marion.Bates＠Dartmouth.EDU