Self started life as Smalltalk-86 at Xerox Parc in a collaboration with Stanford, and then got implemented at Stanford before moving to Sun Labs. When Self was

Self started life as Smalltalk-86 at Xerox Parc in a collaboration with Stanford, and then got implemented at Stanford before moving to Sun Labs. When Self was killed at Sun (the first time in 1994) part of the group joined forces with the "Smalltalk with Types" group to implement StrongTalk. Meanwhile the part of the Self group still at Sun created Pep, which was a Java on top of Self that was way faster than any other Java. But it was a quick hack with a few serious limitations. Animorphic, the StrongTalk company, did a more polished implementation of Java on top of their VM technology and got bought by Sun to turn that into the HotSpot VM working together with the part of the Self group that had stayed at Sun all along. Around 2000 Sun allowed the Self project to be restarted until they killed it again in 2006, at which time they open sourced StrongTalk (which had been hidden since Animorphic had been bought).