On 3/15/07, Robert Dober <robert.dober / gmail.com> wrote:

> It might be noteworthy though that the Squeak folks *are* the original
> developers of Smalltalk.

Well Dan Ingalls was one of the Squeak developers, and the first
Smalltalk implementer.  He actually amazed Alan Kay when he showed him
an actuall implementation of the ideas which Alan had sketched out on
a single sheet of paper.  If I'm not mistaken Dan's first Smaltalk
interpreter was written in Basic of all things, but he carried it
through many significant stages including Smalltalk-72, Smalltalk-76
and Smalltalk-80.  The last I heard Dan was working for Sun on Java,
although still making contributions to Squeak.

Another main contributor to Squeak is/was John Maloney who's a bit too
young to be an original Smalltalk contributer.  John was a student of
Alan Borning at the University of Washinton. Borning had built a
constraint-based simulation system in Smalltalk named Thinglab.  John
(along with Bjorn Freeman-Benson) built a more generalized
constraint-based system called Thinglab II as doctoral students under
Borning.

And of course Alan Kay was involved as well, Squeak started while he
was an Apple Fellow, and continued with funding from Disney when he
became a Disney Fellow. I suspect that Alan's major role was as a
idea/spark generator, cheerleader and user of Squeak for his
multi-media simulation projects with kids.

My first encounter with Squeak came at OOPSLA many years ago.  It was
about the time when Java was really starting to take the wind out of
Smaltalk's sails, probably more do to the fact that IBM and ParcPlace
Digitalk were charging big bucks for Smalltalk implementations while
Java could be had for free as long as you accepted Sun's licensing
terms.

As I recall, John Maloney invited me to a birds-of-a-feather session.
I walked into the room to find all these Smalltalkers huddled together
marveling over the constraint based Morphic MVC framework, and Dan's
music synthesis code. I had the impression that we were like the
Christians hiding out in the catacombs while the Romans(Java drinkers)
were having their orgies outside. <G>
-- 
Rick DeNatale

My blog on Ruby
http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/