patrick (04/07/83)
A little over a week ago (March 29), I attended a Stanford Computer
Science Colloquium on Smalltalk-80, given by David Robson of Xerox
PARC. Although the talk mostly covered old ground, I found out
some interesting tidbits by talking to David Robson afterwards:
There is a new, hour-long video tape of the Smalltalk-80
system. (I didn't ask about availability). A 10 minute
excerpt was shown at the talk, and it looked reasonable...
There are three more books coming. These are not the
exact titles, but are descriptive of the contents:
"Smalltalk-80 Implementation Notes" -- a collection
of papers from the beta-test implementors of Smalltalk-80
(Apple, DEC, HP, and Tektronix), a history of Smalltalk
by Dan Ingalls of PARC, and possibly other related papers.
This book is nearly complete (the manuscript is close to
being turned into galleys).
"A User's Guide to the Smalltalk-80 system" -- a user
oriented view of the Smalltalk user interface, showing
how to use the various components (browser windows,
notify windows, project windows, ...). This book
is partly complete (a manuscript exists, and it is
actively being worked on).
"The Implementation of the Smalltalk-80 User Interface" --
a description of the implementation of the user interface
presented in the user's guide. This book will presumably
contain the class descriptions for all of the user interface
elements (various flavors of window, menus, ...). At present
no manuscript exists. (Sigh! We will probably be waiting
a LONG time for this book to be available).
David Robson indicated that licensing agreements for the tape
containing an bytecode image of the entire system will be
available in "two or three weeks". Apparently, there will be
three types of licenses:
(1) "Academic" use: an inexpensive license intended to be
affordable by small universities/colleges.
(2) "Individual" use: another inexpensive license (not for
resale/redistribution).
(3) "Resale/Redistribution": a much more expensive license
for people/corporations that intend to market Smalltalk
on a particular machine, or base a product on Smalltalk.
The Smalltalk-80 system that is on the tape is the latest version
in use within Xerox PARC (as of a few weeks ago), rather than the
potentially more stable version prepared back in 1980-81. People
within PARC have mixed feelings about the notion of "maintenance",
and it is not clear what support (if any) will be provided...
If anyone out there has more complete or accurate information about the
Smalltalk-80 books or licenses, please send it to net.lang.st80.
Patrick Milligan
Qubix Graphic Systems Inc.
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