Chalk Dust Ports:Squeak
From OpenslateWiki
Squeak is a programming language. At the same time, and to no less extent, it is a
The world was introduced to Smalltalk in 1981, when Byte magazine devoted an issue to what was then a promising new language unlike anything seen before, and until then hidden away within Xerox's R&D department. The Byte editors thought Smalltalk could play a key role in personal computer software development. Regrettably, Smalltalk followed the same path to obscurity as several other languages featured in Byte, among them Forth, Prolog, Modula, even Pascal. The one exception was C, which quickly established itself as the preferred language for personal computer applications ranging from Dbase III to Microsoft Windows and the entire Office suite. It was the advent of C that drove a wedge between programmers and average folk and took programming out of the personal computer experience. Squeak removes the wedge.
Smalltalk was conceived by Alan Kay as a part of his Dynabook concept. The Dynabook could be called the first expression of a personal computer. It was intended to be a slate with a keyboard, book-like in size, portable, and ubiquitous. It would replace books by means of connecting to large information warehouses. All of this sounded like science fiction at the time ... 1968.
Two years later Kay helped open the Xerox R&D center known as the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Although the hardware for the Dynabook was beyond available technology, Xerox did build a desktop system (actually it was the desk) called the Alto which served as a Dynabook development system. Smalltalk was created on the Alto. The Alto included a three button mouse and had a graphical video display. These features were fundamental to the design of the Smalltalk user interface. It was a demo of Smalltalk running on a Alto that inspired Steve Jobs to create the Macintosh. Regretablly he was so overwhelmed by Smalltalk's multi-windowed graphical interface that he failed to see the significance of the Smalltalk language.
The first wave of Smalltalk implementations were commercial products aimed at professional programmers, with price tags to match. Eventually Kay and some associates working at Disney decided they needed a free, open-source version of Smalltalk with features missing from the available commercial versions, and Squeak was born. This group, known as Squeak Central (a.k.a. SqC), included at various times many of the notable Smalltalk experts, amoung them Alan Kay, Pat Brecker, Dan Ingalls, Scott Wallace, Ted Kaehler, John Maloney, Kim Rose, Andreas Raab and Michael Rueger.
Squeak provides a modern, graphical user interface yet manages to expose all of its internals to users. Software development is straightforward and within the grasp of any enthusiast; nothing more is required. At the same time, programming is not required any more than on a Mac or a PC, making Squeak useful to everyone.
Open Slate intends to implement Squeak "on top of" FreeBSD, X, and a traditional window manager. This will be necessary at first due to the lack of key applications in Squeak, such as a full-featured web browser. However, it can be run on top of a minimal window manager and is capable of running directly on top of X.
Ideally, an Open Slate user will remain within Squeak for everything they do. Here is Dan Ingalls, one of Squeak's principle developers, on Squeaks role:
Remember, I said "personal" computing environment. This has many ramifications. One aspect is that things must stay small and simple enough that they remain comprehensible and accessible to one person. One approach to desktop publishing would be to somehow intertwine Squeak with Microsoft Word through ActiveX: it's easy, just use what's there and order three sets of manuals each six inches high ;-). Our approach, instead, is to do it all from scratch in Squeak, simply and generally, possibly omitting some features, but ending up with something that most folks on the Squeak list could understand, and that serves most of our needs. Another of the "personal" aspects of this approach is that the end result is independent of Microsoft and Intel; it will run just fine on any of the bare chips from Acorn, Hitachi or Mitsubishi, that cost $10-$20 each, with nothing but a BIOS. -- Dan Ingalls, "Squeak's Place in the Universe" ca. 1997 http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/158
Mr. Ingalls continued to develope this idea. The Squeak web site has some information about SqueakNOS, introduced by this quote:
Operating System: An operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a language. There shouldn't be one. -- Dan Ingalls, in an article in Byte Magazine, 1981.
The developers of Unix may not agree, but recall that early personal computers like the Apple ][ did not have an operating system, they came up in Basic.
