Rosetta Smalltalk

An independent implementation of Smalltalk, made to fit the personal computers of the time. Remarkably, it was released in about 1980, the same year that PARC made the first public release of Smalltalk.

NEW! My Rosetta Smalltalk Emulator is now available! Not everything works, but lots of things will. Try some of the exercises from the original Intel Object Programming Language User's Guide.

These are my notes on its history and technical background.

A screenshot of Rosetta Smalltalk in action. (Datamation magazine, 1980)

Highlights

• A very brief history of the invention of Smalltalk:
  • Developed between 1970 and 1980 at Xerox PARC.
  • Most or all modern Smalltalk implementations are derived from the Smalltalk-80 release.
  • Halfway through the project, they pivoted to a new, more efficient syntax and execution model. Before this, Smalltalk was much weirder...
  • In Smalltalk-72, objects parsed and responded to arbitrary streams of tokens! This was a really pure vision of the idea of a network of communicating objects.
• Rosetta: Scott Warren and Dennis Abbe independently implement Smalltalk for personal computers.
• Intel Object Programming Language: Smalltalk for the Intel 432.
• General purpose macro processors:
  • Useful for writing portable assembly programs.
  • Also a useful model for efficiently decoding Smalltalk-72 style message syntax.

References

Rosetta Smalltalk brochure (1980?)

Rosetta Smalltalk — article for the ACM (1979)

Rosetta Smalltalk Prototype Language Reference Manual (1980) (missing)

Smalltalk-72 Instruction Manual (1976)

Intel Object Programming Language User's Guide (1981)

A Language Independent Macro Processor (1967)

The Mobile Programming System: STAGE2 (1970)

If you have comments, questions, or suggestions regarding this topic, send me an email!