Re: the yearly flurry of email messages...

[John Ohno <john.ohno@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hans-Martin,

Udanax green (xu88) still works out of the box for me. Gold / xu92
(according to the udanax website last I checked) is missing the code
that compiles the pseudo-smalltalk language 'X' to c++; if the 'X'
language documentation is floating around then reimplementing a
compiler should be trivial.

A few months ago I made a tarball of all the current official and
semi-official xanadu websites I'm aware of (udanax.com, xanadu.com,
xanadu australia, hyperland, sunless-sea, and the trans-literary
project). If any documentation is floating around on the web (rather
than being locked up in an XOC member's desk drawer) it's probably in
there. If you like, I can dig it up for you.


On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 3:54 AM, Craig Latta <craig@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hi Hans-Martin!
>
> Â Â I'm delighted to contribute to the flurry. :)
>
> Â Â 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.
>
> Â Â 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. :) ÂOf 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.
>
> Â Â Some background for those who are not familiar, or forgot, or have
> blotted it out... ;) ÂI 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.
>
> Â Â 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. :) ÂCurse you, day jobs!
>
> Â Â 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 :)
>
> Â Â 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. ;) ÂI'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. :)
>
> Â Â 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 Â06 2757 7177
> + Â1 415 Â287 3547
>
>
>



-- 
--
John Ohno
http://firstchurchofspacejesus.blogspot.com/