Re: the yearly flurry of email messages...

[Craig Latta <craig@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Hans-Martin!

     I'm delighted to contribute to the flurry. :)

     I have all the extant bits and pieces from back in the day (and
even the SPARCstation hardware it ran on)... but... yes, the ParcPlace
stuff is the sticking point. Udanax Gold runs on ParcPlace Objectworks
Smalltalk circa 1988, and the nominal latest-and-greatest version I got
from Roger Gregory crashes the Objectworks virtual machine.

     I need the virtual machine sources so I can debug. I had a
conversation going about it with James Robertson and Georg Heeg several
years ago, but it fizzled out. Perhaps you could revive that part of
things. :)  Of course, this would be with the current appropriate people
(if any :). James has since left what-used-to-be-ParcPlace for greener
(golder?) pastures.


-C

p.s.

     Some background for those who are not familiar, or forgot, or have
blotted it out... ;)  I first heard about Ted and the Xanadu team when I
was working at ParcPlace in 1992, when Ted came to Stanford to give a
talk. I read Gary Wolf's infamous Wired article on the project in
1995[1]. In 1999, when I was at Interval Research, I met Ted, Roger,
Mark, and Andrew at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in Monterey,
where they announced Udanax Green and Gold.

     I contacted Roger after that to see about getting Gold running
again. I came over to his place and we spelunked his garage for old disk
drives, CPUs, memory, etc. I got as far as watching Objectworks crash on
a SPARCstation 10 on my dining room table, then joined in the grand
tradition of Waiting For The Next Victim. :)  Curse you, day jobs!

     I live in Amsterdam now. The hardware is in a storage space in
California, so not terribly convenient, but the bits are all right here.
If Roger (or whomever) doesn't mind I'm happy to share them. Hopefully
we don't really need the hardware anymore, because there are emulators
which run a hundred times as fast and don't complicate the situation?
(Ha ha ha :)

     I've been a Smalltalk hacker since 1991 at UC Berkeley, first with
Objectworks 2.5, then with the first few releases of VisualWorks while
at ParcPlace, then to Squeak in 1996 and thereafter. I've served on the
Squeak board since... oh, god. ;)  I'm preparing a release for the 20th
of next month, a Squeak distribution called Spoon[2,3]. It features a
minimal object memory and virtual machine (the better to learn and
understand the system), and a live module system (the better to
collaborate and distribute changes). The module system works with other
Smalltalks, too (in particular, with VisualWorks). Yes, I know, severe
error 33 risk[4], but I'd suggest that error 34 (being so afraid of
error 33 that you don't do anything) is even worse. :)

     Oh, and I'm available for work. :)


[1] http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu.html
[2] http://netjam.org/spoon (main site)
[3] http://thiscontext.wordpress.com (blog)
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_33

--
Craig Latta
www.netjam.org/resume
+ 31  06 2757 7177
+  1 415  287 3547