
Reviving Smalltalk-78 (2014) [pdf] - pmarin
http://freudenbergs.de/bert/publications/Ingalls-2014-Smalltalk78.pdf
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patrickg_zill
Consider the size of the interpreter and then go load some other JS pages and
measure the size of them. Pretty impressive!

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scroot
Here's a link to the thing running in a browser:
[https://bertfreudenberg.github.io/Smalltalk78/](https://bertfreudenberg.github.io/Smalltalk78/)

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jacquesm
That's very neat. It actually works and from the looks of it has the complete
environment including compiler, I managed to mess up the scrollbar on my first
try :)

You need to get used to the mouse handling for a bit, it's really old school
but it's all there.

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arm
Yep. A tip for anyone not used to old-school mouse handling: when right-
clicking to bring up a contextual menu, you need to hold down the right mouse
button, then (while still holding down the right mouse button) position the
mouse on top of the menu item you want, and finally, let go to select it.

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pmarin
I found the video of the presentation that Dan Ingall did on smalltalk-78

[https://youtu.be/pTh65b8qSY8](https://youtu.be/pTh65b8qSY8)

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no_identd
Here's alankay1 (
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=alankay1](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=alankay1)
) presenting the Alto OS as part of his tribute to Ted Nelson:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnrlSqtpOkw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnrlSqtpOkw)

~~~
pjmlp
Great video thanks for sharing it.

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reaperducer
FTA: "The challenge of porting Smalltalk-76 to a microprocessor with only 256k
bytes of memory..."

Should that be bits, not bytes? 256k bytes was massive in 1976. Even at 8
bits, that would be 16k. I don't know that much about Smalltalk, but that
still seems like a lot of space for the era.

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lucidguppy
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto)

Looks like Alan Kay's baby is loaded with 96-512kb of memory. So it's not a
challenge - but seems like an appropriate target.

Mind you the Alto was primo - Kay was prototyping the future using a wonderful
resource called cash.

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aidenn0
I've been told that MIT managed to convince DARPA to buy them a full address
space (~1MB) of core for a PDP-10 in the 70s. I have no idea how much that
cost, but it had to be absurdly expensive.

Granted this was a timeshare system, not a workstation, so that makes a huge
difference.

Also I was talking with someone who wanted to implement a lisp for a
microcontroller and we came to the conclusion that it had slightly less
storage than the IBM that the original LISP was implemented on in the late
50s, which had a combination of drum and core.

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pjmlp
Which is why when people nowadays say that languages with runtime don't fit,
that is mostly urban myths as many micro-controllers (naturally not all of
them) are like supercomputers in regard to those systems at Xerox and IBM.

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renox
Seeing all these efforts to revive old SWs, I find it a little sad that the
STEPS project released nearly nothing beside papers..

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i_feel_great
Also comes with the standard test image of Lena Söderberg
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna_(test_image)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna_\(test_image\)))

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mseepgood
Why was Smalltalk code always written in Comic Sans?

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bobowzki
Comic Sans was released in 1994.

I also wonder about their choice of typeface though...

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forkerenok
My guess, first half-jokingly now actually real, that it could be a plea to
users to not get too serious with it (at least yet).

