I worked at Interval Research (yet another Palo Alto lab) in the mid/late 90s on a large project (and if it had completed and worked out, would have led to a proper IoT without the crap, maybe) in which we use Smalltalk all the way down to the custom hardware. A few hundred lines of C and assembler tucked away in a corner, but interrupts and processes were all handled in Smalltalk.

It was fun. It could have been great.

Although impolite to ask, do you feel that it not working out may have been influenced by the implementation language?

Not that I've read of, but Vanessa Freudenberg created SqueakJS; a javascript system that can run (pretty much) any Squeak based image in your browser. See https://squeak.js.org/run/

That would be "Chris Muller". Chris wrote, amongst other things, the Magma database and the Maui user interface stuff. Take a look at http://www.squeaksource.com/@QWhy5xpjQLo5Sty4/rBdVcxgb for the Magma code and http://www.squeaksource.com/@QWhy5xpjQLo5Sty4/yM0obItA for the client-server stuff. You might also be interested in the image spawning capabilities in Dave Lewis' OSProcess project; very fast forking of running images with their own work to do etc. See http://www.squeaksource.com/@QWhy5xpjQLo5Sty4/uLwQvnlU

Smalltalk, obviously.

Hi! Waves hands in hopes of getting your attention.

Yes, this is me. Yes, the Squeak on RISC OS page very, very, out of date. I have excuses. Good excuses. The best excuses.

a) I haven't done anything specific for RISC OS in a long time; the latest would be making a then-recent basic system to enable people to play with the Scratch updates I was working on on behalf of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. b) I haven't had time to try to set up to build the newer Cog virtual machine for RISC OS. It needs some support for things like atomic 64 loads/stores and an equivalent for the ticker thread used in the linux VMs. I'm sure it's possible, just time consuming. c) Life. You know, that stuff that gets in the way of hacking. Plagues, death, jobs...

To get the best current experience of Squeak Smalltalk on ARM you can do one of two things -

1) On a Raspberry Pi running 32 bit Pi Os, download the system from squeak.org http://files.squeak.org/5.3/Squeak5.3-19435-32bit/Squeak5.3-... 2) On a Pi running the 64 bit beta OS, you'll need to do the source-download-read-instructions-make-dance. It works well enough that several of us have been using it for daily work for some time. An Apple M1 version is also ongoing. And very fast.

If you really want to have fun with RISC OS and like the idea of contributing, contact me and I'll see if I can help you get started on solving some of the issues referred to above.

Either your 'beefy laptop' isn't so beefy or you're exaggerating for some odd reason. On my four year old iMac (and we all know macs are soon slow by comparison to real computers, right?) it took 15 or sec to load (which is almost all network time) and typing could handle the fastest I could hit keys.