Hi Andrew,
Le 06/11/2017 à 19:59, Andrew Glynn a écrit :
I /suspect/ that a (mostly repressed) underlying sense that a reliable,
inexpensive platform, if popular, would have been more detrimental to
IBM than to its smaller competitors. The same goes for the VisualAge
family -> Smalltalk (sold now by Instantiations at v. 9.0), Java, C++
and COBOL. One of the (largely unthought) reasons for Smalltalk’s
difficulties in the 1990’s, when hardware could run it decently, was
that it took a fair number of resources/time to write a decent version,
while using it would have been a bigger advantage to smaller companies
than to the companies with the money to develop one. The result was
that only a few, very expensive versions were publicly available. VA
Smalltalk still retails at ~$8500 / seat.
Those kinds of hazy (because not admitted to oneself) reasons for doing
things end up resulting in apparently contradictory actions such as
spending large amounts writing something, releasing it, then failing to
support it with any sales or marketing push, and even actively
undermining it. Nobody wants to fully admit that inefficiencies are
actually to their advantage, which is the reason it’s repressed
(implying both known /and/ not known, simultaneously).
I’m totally speculating of course and may be dead wrong, but it fits
with other IBM actions and non-actions. IBM is a strange company that
sees itself, partly for good reason, as a business that must make money
/and/ as an international resource that must continue to exist. Though
the latter depends to a degree on the former, they don’t always imply
the same specific decisions.
Interestingly, to prove the scalability of a VM based system IBM wrote
“RVM” (originally meaning “Renaissance VM”), and proved near linear
scaling to 1024 cores, but RVM is a VM for Squeak and earlier versions
of Pharo, not IBM Smalltalk (the source is available, on GitHub I believe).
https://github.com/smarr/RoarVM
I wouldn't say it is IBM, instead that it is David Ungar work (of Self
and a few other things)...
Has probably ties to the Jikes RVM as well.
Arca Noae (meaning “New Box”), the company that released v.5.0 in June,
was set up because too many big customers can’t migrate crucial apps
from OS/2 to anything else. The new version looks more modern,
borrowing icons and other things from Linux, mainly KDE. It can run a
fair number of Win32 apps, and supports virtually all modern hardware,
scaling to 128 threads and 16GB RAM, though it’s still 32 bit in most
senses.
As you can imagine, given the base requirements are a Pentium Pro with
64MB RAM, on an average laptop today it flies.
I'm not nostalgic, but the object model and how it was handling
versionning was cool.
Anybody remember Taligent?
Thierry
Andrew
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*Sent: *Monday, November 6, 2017 11:55 AM
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*Subject: *Re: [Pharo-users] perspective request for those earning
alivingfromSmalltalk
Andrew,
I worked with OS/2 in the early 90s and really liked it; I adopted it
for my personal use as well. I really enjoyed reading the details you
provided earlier.
I have a hypothesis that when IBM tried to sell OS/2 (Warp) via a retail
channel that it "hurt". A company whose DNA was channel sales would find
dealing with retail issues to be entirely different from everything they
knew. So, I speculate that there were enough people to felt (and argued)
that OS/2 wasn't "worth it".
Any thoughts you would care to share on that supposition would be
appreciated.
*From:*Pharo-users [mailto:pharo-users-boun...@lists.pharo.org] *On
Behalf Of *Andrew Glynn
*Sent:* November 6, 2017 04:18
*To:* Any question about pharo is welcome
*Subject:* Re: [Pharo-users] perspective request for those earning a
livingfromSmalltalk
Thank you. I will see if I can get to it today or tomorrow.
Andrew
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*From: *Davorin Rusevljan <mailto:davorin.rusevl...@gmail.com>
*Sent: *Monday, November 6, 2017 4:17 AM
*To: *Any question about pharo is welcome
<mailto:pharo-users@lists.pharo.org>
*Subject: *Re: [Pharo-users] perspective request for those earning a
livingfromSmalltalk
On Sat, Oct 28, 2017 at 7:59 PM, Andrew Glynn <aglyn...@gmail.com
<mailto:aglyn...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Your history is accurate, but there’s a few things I’d like to add,
due to having been employed by IBM at exactly that period working
specifically on VisualAge, not only for Smalltalk, but for Java, C++
and Cobol as well. (my NDA’s finally having expired also helps
😉). It’s not a correction or contradiction, but a complement to
your description, providing a relevant but different perspective.
Andrew,
please find a way to write an article or blog post on this subject. It
is priceless.
davorin
