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3.5.5.2. Early Vendors
At the time that ParcPlace Systems was formed, several other commercial endeavors existed, as either an outcome of the original licensing program (the commercial license available after the Star implementation was completed) or independent efforts based on published descriptions of the language. The first commercial license went to Tom Love at ITT. Love and Brad Cox later designed a Smalltalk-like preprocessor to C, called Objective C, which they sold through their company Productivity Products Inc. (Cox, 1986). The company changed its name to StepStone and licensed its Objective C to Steve Jobss new company NeXT.
The earliest commercial Smalltalk was Rosetta Smalltalk, an implementation on small Z80 personal computers. Rosetta Smalltalk resembled Smalltalk-72 but used a pattern-matching approach to parsing message expressions. The developers published their version of Smalltalk at an ACM symposium in 1979 (Warren & Abbe, 1979) and exhibited the running system at the Personal Computing Faire held in association with that years NCC. The developers presented their work as exploratory and claim (on their Web site in 1997) that they did not pursue their product plans because PARC started to give Smalltalk away for free. Most likely, the developers referred to the special arrangement with the reviewers, which they knew about as consultants to Intel on how Smalltalk might be implemented on the 432. Intel was not an official part of the release process because it could not meet our requirement to assign an internal software team to the project.
Another early design for Smalltalk on small personal computers was achieved by Tim Budd and his students at the University of Arizona in 1984. Based on the published Smalltalk-80, the group called its language Little Smalltalk (Budd, 1987). Budd published his version of the language as a book and offered the software for free, providing an early learning experience for university computer science students. Little Smalltalk is written in C and runs under UNIX operating systems. The language is still available and in use today.
A few technologists from Computer Sciences Corporation were working in Italy for Olivetti when they noticed the Smalltalk description in the August 1981 Byte Magazine. They set out to implement a textual version of the language that they called Methods. Olivetti transferred the ownership of their work to a new company they formed, called Digitalk. At one point, the founders of Digitalk visited PARC to learn more about Smalltalk. They were certain that an example in the magazine (of block contexts) was in error and were looking for the correct syntax (the example was not in error). Because it was a text-based language, Methods did not try to leverage the library of the Xerox Smalltalk system. In 1986 Digitalk abandoned Methods to market Smalltalk V, a version with a graphical interface. Both of these products were available on PCs and the Apple Macintosh. Unlike Xerox Smalltalk, the compiler and most of the lower-level system functions were not written in Smalltalk itself, which allowed Digitalk to protect what was considered to be the companys special intellectual property. Digitalk did not offer application portability, preferring instead to adhere to the different GUI rules for Mac and Windows.
In contrast, a group from the Linus Pauling Institute in Palo Alto, California, formed a company called Softsmarts and created a PC version of Smalltalk based on the book specification of the virtual machine. The group licensed the virtual image from Xerox. Unfortunately, they were not successful because the Xerox pricing policy targeted the workstation market, not PCs. Later, the founder joined Apple, and then went to a Smalltalk-based training and consulting company called Knowledge Systems Corporation in North Carolina before eventually joining IBM.
Tektronix also went into the Smalltalk business, delivering an extremely well-designed implementation on the Tektronix 4400 (the Magnolia). This workstation included graphics capability that made Smalltalk look very special. The core team, including the marketing manager, formed a training and consulting company called Instantiations, which was later bought by Digitalk. In 1995, with both companies fighting the sales and marketing capability of an IBM Smalltalk entry, ParcPlace Systems and Digitalk merged. (Later sections discuss this in more detail.) Eventually, as a consequence of a business downturn, the company formed from the merger permitted the original Instantiations group to re-create the company to sell the Digitalk Visual Smalltalk technology.
Europe was represented in the Smalltalk community as well. In Germany, Georg Heeg proved to be one of the most active distributors of Smalltalk and object-oriented databases. Small distribution companies started in France, Belgium, Italy, Czechoslovakia (later Slovakia), the United Kingdom, and Scandinavia. Both PPS and Digitalk distributed products as well in Japan, Australia, Mexico, and South America. Fuji Xerox, PPSs partner in Japan, arranged to have the Smalltalk books translated into Japanese while also organizing seminars and courses and creating commercial applications.
3.5.5.3. University Activity
Researchers at universities around the world actively explored Smalltalk. We licensed the virtual image free to all universities and gave access to our PS implementation to selected groups, notably at Dortmund in Germany, Yale, the University of Massachusetts, and the University of Washington. The earliest UNIX implementations were done at the University of Washington, with funding SCG obtained by licensing Smalltalk-80. Alan Bornings Ph.D. thesis centered on ThingLab, a constraint system that introduced one of the earliest multiple inheritance systems for Smalltalk (Borning, 1979; Borning & Ingalls, 1982). Eliot Moss at the University of Massachusetts (Moss et al., 1987) worked on new implementation schemes using Apollos version of UNIX. Eliot Miranda from Queen Mary College, University of London, developed BrouHaHa, a portable implementation of the Smalltalk-80 virtual machine interpreter. Written almost entirely in C, BrouHaHa is portable among 32-bit machines with C compilers (Miranda, 1987). The Dortmund group, headed by Georg Heeg, formed a commercial company and became an early distributor in Germany for PPS. The Berkeley Smalltalk implementation was also made freely available and was a significant factor in increasing the awareness and use of Smalltalk-80 at universities.
Ralph Johnson at the University of Illinois has been instrumental as an educator, a researcher, and a consultant. His early work was the Typed Smalltalk project, whose goal was to provide an optimizing compiler for Smalltalk applications (Johnson, 1986). Others worked on type inferencing, with the earliest work done by Nori Suzuki, a researcher at PARC and later at the University of Tokyo (but most recently a high-level manager with Sony). UC Berkeley students and faculty, led by Dave Patterson, investigated implementation architectures and the possibility of special hardware designs in the Smalltalk on a RISC project mentioned earlier (Ungar & Patterson, 1983). Notable among these students was David Ungar, whose work on generation scavenging proved significant in the redesigns for the PPS products (Ungar, 1986). Ungar then worked on the language SELF (first at Stanford and then at Sun Microsystems), whose compiler design influenced David Griswold. Griswold initially created StrongTalk (Griswold, 1993), a typechecker for a downward-compatible subset of Smalltalk. He then combined the StrongTalk designs with that of the SELF compiler to create a small and fast virtual machine kernel, one for Smalltalk and another for Java. Griswolds company, Horizon Technologies, was acquired in 1997 by Sun Microsystems.
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