thomas@clan.UUCP (Dave Thomas) (01/11/85)
I recently received a demostration of METHODS, a Smalltalk-80 system for
the IBM PC. I haven't yet received my beta test copy, but I was impressed
with what I saw. The company built METHODS from scratch using the book and
BYTE as their only sources. They claim to execute 25 to 50K byte codes ,
incredible given the rates of the TEK and Xerox 68000 implementations.
It requires a PC with 512 and two floppies. The system uses character
based windows(a bit mapped version is in the works) and supports colour
windows(a bit two much for me). The editing and compilation are much faster
than the SUN 2 BS implementation that we are currenly using. The
implementors have done a lot of hand tuning of their kernel.
The version I saw didn't include floating point and graphics, otherwise it
seemed very complete. Digitalk expect to add the graphics and floating point
in the next couple of months. Naturally they recommend running METHODS on an
8MHZ 8088/8086 or 286 with 640K. The source for all methods is distributed
with the system. Digitalk do not distribute the source for the compiler or
the kernel. The source is compressed to approximately 200kb! DIGITALK
expect to start shipping release 1.0 this month for approximately $250(I
think). They have an add in January BYTE. I'll post my beta test
experiences to net.micro.pc and net.lang.st80 after I kick the tires. Sadly this message comes from
my favourite LISA 2/10 with MACTERMINAL(but I have XLISP on order).
For further information please contact:
Digitalk, Inc.
5200 West Century Boulevard
Los Angeles, California 90045
213-645-1082