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Hi,
I've been reading about the old LispMachines, and wondered if a Smalltalk equivalent also existed at that time?
"The Design and Evaluation of a High Performance Smalltalk System" sunsite.berkeley.edu/pub/techreps/CSD-86-287.html
SOAR (mentioned by Davide Grandi - thanks for the link!) was one of the great student project Smalltalk machines. The others were Mushroom and J-Machine:
Though the Xerox PARC computers such as the Alto and Dorado were never released commercially and not all were used as Smalltalk machines I think it is fair to compare them to the Symbolics and LMI efforts. The Rekursive was an important Smalltalk machine that never reached the market:
www.brouhaha.com/~eric/retrocomputing/rekursiv/
If we expand our definition to include computers using conventional microprocessors but built specifically to run Smalltalk then we have some that were actually sold: the Tektronix 4404 (68010) and 4406 (68020) workstations and the Momenta (386SX) pen based computer (what Microsoft has been calling tabletPCs).
www.byte.com/art/9611/sec4/art1.htm
Some products of this kind that failed to reach the market were the Exobox (ARM?), Interval Research (ARM) and my own Merlin efforts (68000 and ARM).
www.merlintec.com/lsi/history.html
I still haven't given up and fortunately FPGAs now allow me to build the first class of machines (custom Smalltalk processors) instead of the second.
There were other student project and commercial efforts beyond those I listed above, but it would take a short book to do them all justice.
from the Merlin project above: a bytecode-less Smalltalk
Issac Gouy wrote:
>> Rekursiv used a Smalltalk 'like' language - not Smalltalk
While in practice the focus was on Lingo, the November 1988 Byte magazine article did present the Rekursive as a Smalltalk machine. Mario Wolczko's comment (in 1992) about how much (actually how little) was developed in this direction is interesting:
www.merlintec.com/old-self-interest/msg00248.html
-- Jecel
>> If we expand our definition to include computers using conventional microprocessors
And not sold but almost completed before being killed by ATT, the Active Book (2Mb rom, 1Mb ram, full Smalltalk-80 system, ARM 8MHz).
>> Some products of this kind that failed to reach the market were the Exobox (ARM?)
The exobox stuff was platform agnostic though mainly expected to run on a linux- ish OS.
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