Digitalk Smalltalk/V for Mac

With permission from the authors, Stéphane Ducasse of the Pharo project is hosting a book that covers a very similar, API compatible version of Smalltalk/V, and a tutorial aimed at Pascal programmers.

Though the uploaded archive lacks sample code, the documentation above provides a good means of getting up and running with Smalltalk/V (STV). STV can be thought of as a faster, less feature rich Smalltalk than Smalltalk-80, specifically made for underpowered IBM PCs and other consumer computers of the time.

STV was, for a time, the most commercially successful Smalltalk. The PC version, Smalltalk/V 286, was so well received by IBM that IBM made a very significant investment in the language, leading to the VisualAge development tools, a source code management system called ENVY/Developer, and a whole host of other neat things.

Then the winds changed and Java became a more attractive option, indirectly leading to Eclipse rising from the ashes of a VisualAge for Java project.

Oh well.

Somewhere out there is a Smalltalk/V 2.0 for Mac, an alpha version of which Alan Kay's group used to build a simulation programming environment for children. That's Playground II and III, Scott Wallace's work for the Vivarium project.

Playground has nothing to do with ATG's Cocoa project, though the goals seem similar from a distance.