Discussion:
Smalltalk for z80 processor
Tim Rowledge
2012-01-28 10:11:46 UTC
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Has anyone implemented an Smalltalk VM on z80 (8bits) processors ?
There was also the 6502 Smalltalk that my old colleague Chris Macie did
many years ago. He published a couple of papers/article about it and I
_think_ one them appeared in Byte.

tim
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Alejandro F. Reimondo
2012-01-28 10:34:19 UTC
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Has anyone implemented an Smalltalk VM on z80 (8bits) processors ?
Ale.
Alan Kay
2012-01-28 10:52:05 UTC
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FYI --

This was an excellent "redesign" and implementation of Smalltalk-72. I.e.
instead of being slavish to what we had done at PARC and making a literal
copy, they came up with a very interesting set of improvements to ST-72,
most of which really helped the end user. The Exidy (Z80) wasn't up to the
bitmap graphics that the Alto could do, but nonetheless, this system was
fun to contemplate ... There were several papers written by these folks ...

Cheers,

Alan

--------
Has anyone implemented an Smalltalk VM on z80 (8bits) processors ?
<http://www.rosetta.com/RosettaFAQ.html#are-smalltalk>
There's a description of the system in the ACM SIGSMALL magazine, Vol. 5,
#2 of October 1979, pp. 36-45. The language itself was neither -72 nor -76,
but "related".
Judging from the pictures, Rosetta(tm) Smalltalk offered a windowed
(character-oriented), conversational environment (command line window, file
list, text editor, debugger) on the Exidy Sorcerer and equivalent machines
of the time. They say the system took 12k of machine code plus 4k of
predefined objects, leaving the rest for the workspace.
HTH,
Helge
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