4 ms·

I just realized who you are. First of all, thanks for the info in this thread - the context is great and helps fill in a bunch of the story that the site gloss

I just realized who you are. First of all, thanks for the info in this thread - the context is great and helps fill in a bunch of the story that the site glosses over. Secondly, I’ve been teaching my nephew and niece Smalltalk on the Raspberry Pi thanks to Crosstalk. So I can finally thank you for bringing that port into the world.

johndoe0815 4y ago
Whoops, my 15 minutes of fame on the Internet :). You're very welcome - great to see this information is still valuable to somebody out there. As a student in the '90s, it was fascinating being able to play around with all sorts of exotic hardware and from time to time grab some of it from the university's scrap heap. One was able to learn so much... I still try to keep some of the old machines running. It becomes harder to find spare parts, but due to great projects by the open source hardware and software community (such as the various SCSI disk emulators and also system emulators such as qemu), some of it has also become much easier. Now I just need more time... And I'm really happy to see that you are using Crosstalk for Smalltalk's original purpose! It's amazing to see the response to my little side project - high time to update it a bit (and add a RISC-V port). I hope your nephew and niece like it!
- spijdar 4y ago
  I'd like to echo the thanks for taking the time to write everything down here -- I was only born in the late 90s, so these machines are all before my time, and I love learning more about them. I'm stuck with exploring the odd workstations I could get before the last reasonably priced ones dried up, and my modern POWER9 workstation. Things are better in a lot of ways now, but there's something magical about computers that power-on to Forth prompts and have ring binders full of detailed pin-outs and board schematics...

4 ms·

I just realized who you are. First of all, thanks for the info in this thread - the context is great and helps fill in a bunch of the story that the site gloss

by atdrummond 4y ago

johndoe0815 4y ago
Whoops, my 15 minutes of fame on the Internet :). You're very welcome - great to see this information is still valuable to somebody out there. As a student in the '90s, it was fascinating being able to play around with all sorts of exotic hardware and from time to time grab some of it from the university's scrap heap. One was able to learn so much... I still try to keep some of the old machines running. It becomes harder to find spare parts, but due to great projects by the open source hardware and software community (such as the various SCSI disk emulators and also system emulators such as qemu), some of it has also become much easier. Now I just need more time... And I'm really happy to see that you are using Crosstalk for Smalltalk's original purpose! It's amazing to see the response to my little side project - high time to update it a bit (and add a RISC-V port). I hope your nephew and niece like it!
- spijdar 4y ago
  I'd like to echo the thanks for taking the time to write everything down here -- I was only born in the late 90s, so these machines are all before my time, and I love learning more about them. I'm stuck with exploring the odd workstations I could get before the last reasonably priced ones dried up, and my modern POWER9 workstation. Things are better in a lot of ways now, but there's something magical about computers that power-on to Forth prompts and have ring binders full of detailed pin-outs and board schematics...