Smalltalk
Hard Drive Recovery - Smalltalk
Smalltalk is an object-oriented computer programming language created at Xerox PARC by Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Adele Goldberg, Ted Kaehler, Scott Wallace and others during the 1970s.
Smalltalk was first released as Smalltalk-80 Version 1 and has been used widely since then. Smalltalk-80 was the first language variant made available outside of PARC. It was given to a few companies and universities for peer review and implementation on their platforms.
Version 2 of Smalltalk was released in 1983 as a general availability implementation. It was released as a platform-independent file with object definitions and a virtual machine specification. ANSI Smalltalk, which was ratified in 1998, has been accepted as the standard language reference since 1998.
ParcPlace Systems and Digitalk were the two companies that sold Smalltalk environments during the 1980s to mid-1990s. ParcPlace Systems tended to focus on the Unix/Sun Microsystems market, while Digitalk emphasized Intel-based PCs that were running either Microsoft Windows or IBM’s OS/2. However, they could not succeed in the market.
In 1995, ParcPlace and Digitalk merged into ParcPlace-Digitalk and then rebranded in 1997 as ObjectShare. In 1999, Seagull Software acquired the Java development lab of ObjectShare including the original Smalltalk/V and Visual Smalltalk development team. The company still owns VisualSmalltalk though worldwide distribution rights for the Smalltalk product remained with ObjectShare who then sold them to Cincom.
Two of the currently popular implementation variants of Smalltalk are Squeak and VisualWorks. Squeak is an open source implementation derived from Smalltalk-80 Version 1 by way of Apple Smalltalk. VisualWorks is derived from Smalltalk-80 version 2 by way of Smalltalk-80 2.5 and ObjectWorks.
