charliep (12/29/82)
I spoke briefly with Rosetta earlier this year, so I don't think they are out of business yet -- they seemed to have plenty of work to do when I was there. So, Xerox did not force them out of business. However, there was apparently a lot of fuss from Xerox over the *very idea* that someone else would *degrade* Smalltalk by trying to implement it on a Z80. Needless to say, their version did NOT execute 1,000,000 bytecodes per second -- but the combined speed of all Smalltalk engines available to the public at the time was 0 bytecodes per second. I too am a strong supporter of Smalltalk, philosophically at least; and think that Xerox REALLY SHOULD have given it to us much earlier.
jjhnsn@ut-ngp.UUCP (J. Lee Johnson) (07/25/84)
There has been some discussion on the net about Rosetta Smalltalk.
Rosetta Smalltalk was written by Scott K. Warren and Dennis Abbe of
Rosetta, Inc., 5925 Kirby Drive, Houston, Tx 77005. They had a prototype
Z80 version running in 1979, and later, under contract to Intel, worked
on versions for newer microprocessors. I believe Intel paid for the new
versions and never used them.
I have a Beta test version of Rosetta Smalltalk that runs under CP/M or
CDOS on my Cromemco Z80 computer. The window software is configured for
a Zenith-Z19/Heath-H19 terminal. While Rosetta is not a "graphic"
smalltalk, the window system is impressive. Only workspace availability
limits the size and number of windows. Window "frames" are drawn with
the Z19 graphic characters. The smalltalk mouse is a secondary cursor
(block style) that is moved around the screen by control keys.
I cannot even begin to think of a reasonable benchmark to run under
Rosetta and (for example) Microsoft Basic. Other than both being
interative and conversational, they are totally different. Rosetta
Smalltalk echos typed characters promptly, and the window software is
quite acceptable, even on a 9600 baud serial terminal. Rosetta
Smalltalk for the Exidy Sorcerer is even more impressive.
Rosetta Smalltalk was based on the work at Xerox PARC, but is not an
implementation of Smalltalk-72, Smalltalk-76, or Smalltalk-80. As far
as I know, Rosetta Smalltalk was never available commercially. The
software and manual that I have are prototypes. A lot of stuff on the
market is not as well done.
For more information see:
"Rosetta Smalltalk: A Conversational, Extensible Microcomputer Language",
Scott K. Warren, Dennis Abbe; ACM SigPC Notes, vol. 2, numbers 1/2
(spring/summer 1979).
Or come by my house for a demo :-)
"Texans for Bill the Cat"
James Lee Johnson, U.T. Computation Center, Austin, Texas 78712
ARPA: jjhnsn@ut-ngp
UUCP: {allegra,ihnp4,gatech,ut-sally}!ut-ngp!jjhnsnbrucec@orca.UUCP (Master of the Belvedere) (08/04/84)
---------- >> Rosetta Smalltalk was written by Scott K. Warren and Dennis Abbe of >> Rosetta, Inc., 5925 Kirby Drive, Houston, Tx 77005. They had a prototype >> Z80 version running in 1979, and later, under contract to Intel, worked >> on versions for newer microprocessors. I believe Intel paid for the new >> versions and never used them. Intel did in fact market Rosetta Smalltalk on the iAPX 432 processor (the 432-100 board, which plugs into an Intel "bl