Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 beta 3/9/83; site hplabs.UUCP Path: utzoo!decvax!harpo!seismo!hao!hplabs!jf From: jf@hplabs.UUCP (Joe Falcone) Newsgroups: net.lang.st80 Subject: Re: Smalltalk-80 Licenses Message-ID: <1513@hplabs.UUCP> Date: Wed, 8-Jun-83 15:01:09 EDT Article-I.D.: hplabs.1513 Posted: Wed Jun 8 15:01:09 1983 Date-Received: Mon, 13-Jun-83 09:46:23 EDT References: <4543@cornell.UUCP>, <4562@cornell.UUCP> Organization: Hewlett Packard Labs, Palo Alto CA Lines: 87 I have noticed that most (if not all) of the discussion of Smalltalk in this newsgroup has been by people who have (at best) played with Smalltalk. Some of the mis-information has been quite amusing at time, including that from "pavel" who apparently has some association with PARC. I was one of the members of the HP Smalltalk project (part of the Xerox test distribution program). Yes, campers, HP, DEC, Apple, and Tektronix all have licenses for Smalltalk. Did we pay for them? Yes and No. We didn't pay money, but we did pay engineering time to help debug the distribution. (I doubt whether any of these companies would have actually PAID real money for licenses - it was far easier to justify having engineers spend a year fiddling with it). I have "Smalltalk: The Language and Its Implementation" on my bookshelf. Nice reading. We have gone through the galley phase (including some wild things that some Xerox text editor did to some of the papers) on "Smalltalk 80: Bits of History, Words of Advice". It is likely that this book will be paperback for those who are budget conscious. It is a collection of articles from the 4 test sites, plus University of Washington (courtesy Al Borning), UCB, and Xerox. Glenn Krasner managed the feat of coordinating a book whose authors were sprinkled across the country. He deserves much praise. I have a late, but now old draft of "Smalltalk 80: The Interactive Programming Environment" by Adele Goldberg. I really don't know what has happened to this book. My draft is dated August 1982 and looks for all the world to be camera-ready. I'll be very surprised if this book is delayed much longer. My impression is that the fourth book, "Smalltalk 80: Creating a User Interface and Graphical Applications" has always been on the bottom of everyone's list at PARC. Last I heard, which was a few months ago, it had not been started, but that may have changed. However, given the fact that the first book was started back in early 1980, it may be another year before we see this book. Incidentally, for those of you contemplating publishing a collection of technical works, Glenn's original schedule for "Bits of History" was: June 15, 1982 First drafts July 15, 1982 Peer review complete (authors review one anothers papers) August 15, 1982 Drafts consolidated at PARC September 15, 1982 Book is sent to publishers. Pre-publication copies ready in a month, real copies hit shelves in six. We probably slipped 3 to 6 months - they are predicting summer or fall for the "Bits of History" book. As for the implementations out there, here are my impressions. I have had the good fortune to see all of the implementations, except for the SUN version. As part of the "Bits of History" book, there will be a table of Benchmarks for each implementation. The fastest one is on the Xerox Dorado. What else is new? The big surprise was for second place. The second fastest is neither the Dolphin nor the VAX implementations, but a surprisingly clever job done by Tektronix on the 68000. Now, as previously mentioned on the net, Peter Deutsch put Smalltalk on a SUN-type workstation. However, he has released no performance figures. The Tektronix implementation is quite useable, the UCB, DEC, and HP implementations are useable if you kick everyone else off the VAX (Smalltalk is for personal computers, but I don't know whether you can call a single-user VAX a personal computer). The Apple 68000 implementation is slower than the VAX versions, but is eminently more useable since only $10K worth of hardware is necessary and that hardware is commercially available as the Lisa, including mouse. For those of you who are interested in the practical chore of implementing a sophisticated system like Smalltalk, I would highly recommend "Bits of History" (or whatever they decide to call it). All four companies contributed interesting articles, each discussing different solutions to the same Smalltalk performance problems. Of course, take my recommendation with a grain of salt since I am one of the contributors and hence have a financial interest. Hope I have cleared the air for a while, Joe Falcone hplabs!jf