ST80 Alternatives
Similar projects and alternatives to ST80
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Smalltalk
Parser, code model, interpreter and navigable browser for the original Xerox Smalltalk-80 v2 sources and virtual image file (by rochus-keller)
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InfluxDB
Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
ST80 reviews and mentions
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The Xerox Smalltalk-80 GUI Was Weird
I'm assuming the "by the Bluebook" implementation they're referring to is this: https://github.com/devhawala/ST80
It's nice to use, but awkward because almost nobody has a three-button mouse laying around. One of the cool things about the Blue Book is that it lays out exactly how to implement e.g. graphics primitives and even the object system itself. In fact, the implementation I linked above uses the exact implementation of these things as outlined in the Blue Book, just written in Java.
> The first thing is that the Smalltalk environment wasn't really an operating system the same way something like Mac OS was. It’s more like an IDE that runs on bare hardware.
I disagree with this. It is an operating system. Just because it doesn't have barriers like a kernel and doesn't treat debuggers as third-class citizens doesn't make it any less of an operating system. It just makes it "not Unix". Lisp machines were also very similar in this regard: there is no "system" in the Unix sense: your compiler, debugger, and system were a whole unit.
> The Smalltalk environment was a revolutionary GUI, but it was still a system you would have had to have been a computer operator or something to really use.
Probably true. But I'd also like to mention the images in the GitHub link I posted are very early snapshots of Smalltalk-80 and may lack any features that were added later. More importantly, the author is missing that these machines came with a manual that likely described how to use the interface. But I do have have to concede: these machines were extremely expensive and definitely not targetted towards "everyday people".
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devhawala/ST80 is an open source project licensed under GNU General Public License v3.0 or later which is an OSI approved license.
The primary programming language of ST80 is Java.
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