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Squeakers at Squeakend 00

Participants: Please add references here...

Stephen Pope, It's best if you view his web page http://www.create.ucsb.edu/~stp. In 83 he saw Smalltalk and never did anything else {until recently}, in 1986 he got to work at Xerox Parc then ParcPlace Systems and onward to a number of interesting jobs and of course UCSB.
stp "at" create.ucsb.edu

Florian Hammer (Create Research Student) electrical and recording engineer, assisting for the weekend.
florian "at" create.ucsb.edu

Pierre Roy (Create Research Student) has a background in VW and a year of Squeak. His thesis work centers about dynamic music creation in Squeak using constraints.
pierre "at" create.ucsb.edu

Alex Kouznetsov (Create Research Student) working at Create. Attempting to do some commercial applications in Smalltalk.
alex "at" create.ucsb.edu

John Maloney. A cast member of Squeak Central. Originally from the Self group and before that a student of Allan Borning and author of ThingLab2. Randy Smith and himself are responsible for Morphic. His side interest are music, sound and VM stuff. Also education, which of course is Alan Kay's deep interest. Disney is attempting to get reconnected to kids.
john.maloney "at" disney.com

Laurence Rozier. Works at Web Crossing a company that provides a community building infrastructure. One of the authors (with Dan Shafer) of "Smalltalk for Windows"
Currently using Squeak for crafting out tools to get rid of Java Script etc, wants usage of Squeak for tools. Actively involved in bring Squeak into a commercial world, busy building web based communities.
Laurence went on to discuss a product called Framework (Ashton Tate?). In 1984 Framework was were Smalltalk should be. Laurence spent a long time over the years to create Framework in Smalltalk, the ability to organize and do communication in Framework, not the low level stuff. Promised to talk about some architectural stuff about a composite pattern called 'FreeDOM' a dynamic model to allow one to meld into existing Web structure XML etc, to unify some of the Squeak environment. Like the ability to melt things like projects into a document. It's rough but exciting on the visual level. It's exciting when you can take stuff from the web and email without worrying about how it works. also interested education.
laurence "at" wetalknetwork.com

Douglas McPherson works for a startup company. Introduced to Smalltalk in Canada via Carlton University. Did some work with embedded Smalltalk on a project with Sony. Recently used Squeak for modeling Also took Ralph Johnson's Smalltalk course via the internet last winter. Currently modeling in Smalltalk doing a SLANG to C for embedded Smalltalk. Truly honored to be here with these important people since he's only added/corrected have one method in the image.
djm "at" san.rr.com

Jim Benson worked five odd years doing interpreters, and VMs. For the last few years doing special effects in the Movie industry, very tedious, very 'boring'. Squeak now is at the point were you can do something very interesting. It's about to turn the corner and jump on the bandwagon. Likes Morphic.
jb "at" speed.net

John M McIntosh {Because of the many Johns present I'll refer to myself as JMM, and John Sarkela and John Maloney by their last names to avoid confusion).
johnmci "at" smalltalkconsulting.com

Dan Ingalls is trying to get Squeak to the point of Web distribution. With Ted Kaehler we now have the ability to swap in/swap out a project or object. We should be able to swap in a thing, play with it and then dispose of it. But we need to visit our roots, to go back to Morphic, and Fabrik. Demo's of Squeak should start with simple demos, this should flow naturally it doesn't really do that, it should. That’s a big change, farther back Smalltalk was simple but now Morphic is hairy, Smalltalk started life in a 48K machine, but now it's MegaBytes. The kernel is huge, so how do we make things smaller. Thanked all for being here, it's a honor on being here being able to work with people that are so bright.
STP pointed out the ACM award to Dan was to Alan, Adele, Dan.
A trio that has different skill, a very magical threesome, not one person was responsible for the vision, many are.
At some point in the weekend Dan Ingalls admitted that the first interpreter of Smalltalk-72 was written in BASIC, on the only machine Dan Ingalls had access to that had an interactive environment, a Data General Nova
dan.ingalls "at" disney.com

Carsten Haerle - Frankfurt Carsten.Haerle@parox.com works with Pocket Smalltalk, well Squeak is too big, 400K is too big. The kernel should shrink. Maloney said Pocket Smalltalk has few methods and it's elegant.
STP said look C++ is big look how much memory it needs. Maloney talked about Alan Kay's talk and his huge image, but remember the image is only one MB of bytecodes, and of course 100MB+ of content.
Found Smalltalk by accidentally purchasing a copy of Digitalk on a shopping trip to California from Europe. It was cheap but life changing, it's an addiction. Bought all the Digitalk products. Does consulting work with business, and education. Has done some VM work on Pocket Smalltalk. The group agreed he held the record for long distance traveled, all the way from Frankfurt, quite a few people suffered the weekend with jet lag.
Carsten.Haerle "at" parox.com

Mark Schwenk is a consultant, introduced to computing by a 300 baud teletype. Joined ACM in High School, saw a 1976 Smalltalk paper, played with Forth. Then off to Urbana, and did an Computer Engineering Degree. Did some Unix work, then some work at Bell Labs in Chicago, early adopter of C++, had a chance to work with Jim Coplen at Bell. Bought Smalltalk V for the Macintosh, Smalltalk was real. Looked at ObjectWorks but no fit in his work, perhaps from a visual viewpoint, but not from a cost, licensing viewpoint. So did lots of graphics framework work, much better if he could have had Smalltalk and not spent years doing the framework stuff.
Squeak today could have changed the world 10 years ago, he took Ralph's internet course in 1999, then revived the Chicago Smalltalk User Group, and is working with the Chicago Patterns Group and having Smalltalk workshops on the weekends. Currently providing web-based information systems for small businesses now. Has a vision of Squeak Pro. The issue is licensing and cost for commercial products for small businesses, with Squeak it's free.
mas "at" wellthot.com

John-Reed Maffeo works for Motorola, originally an accountant but learned about Squeak/Smalltalk. His work is around mainframes and distributed systems. Introduced to Smalltalk as a tool to do development work (ie VisualWorks) VisualWorks was high on the list to purchase, but ParcPlace's financials were a concern. Motorola uses everything, from years back. Since Smalltalk can run on everything the tool is still very interesting.
But interest in Squeak is in mapping for backpacking. John explained he found and downloaded Squeak version 1.7. After I downloaded it and found I could do things quickly, not un-fun like dealing with compilers etc. I found I could do things in Squeak, my mission is to learn as much as I can. It seems Morphic is moving in a direction where we can support geographical applications.
rlpa80 "at" email.sps.mot.com

John Sarkela got THE August issue of Byte magazine. The balloon, he then ordered the first edition of the blue book. He and his room-mate read it from cover to cover, did we understand Meta-classes no but we thought we did. He did work at Motorola, then off to California and then LA and started at Digitalk working on the VM. Then startups, lately Sony, did a communication device running Smalltalk, bad management sunk Sony's entire wireless division.
He went on to explain about his current company, The 4th estate. A short history of France ensued. 'it is those people the 4th estate' Were we are going, let people publish from their digital communicator, camera sound content. Models of publishing a 'Red Hat for Squeak' Things are evolving.
john_sarkela "at" 4thEstate.com

Tim Rowledge has 16 years of Smalltalk and VM experience, 15 years making a living doing nothing but that. A record for continuous paid work?
Just got pluginised VM worki with serial, MIDI, sockets, form printing, sound etc as VM plugins, hopes to get file services to work this week. Should have a VM that is deaf, dumb, blind, just a computation engine. But then plug in all the features YOU need. Even think about things like GC and memory allocation. So for example a simple Smalltalk script engine that runs a few statements doesn't need a GC.
tim "at" sumeru.stanford.edu

Craig Latta was introduced to Smalltalk at UCB in late 89 found a lost copy of the blue book lying in the experimental lab. Didn't have access to an actual system for about a year. Got to play with ObjectWorks V2.3, met STP, and found out what Smalltalk programmers made on Wall Street. Also met Danny Openhim? In early 90 got a job at ParcPlace doing VM work with Tim on the OS/2 VM. Got to see the largest Smalltalk implementation in Sandanesta? labs. This could be good or bad, a system for NASA related to space shuttle. Then off to Atari, are they still around?. They did a comeback for a while and worked on a number of games. Then met Rodger Mike?, from Interval on a home networking project with Tim (yet again). A bunch of old super heros meeting to save the world yet again. See johmci's OOPSLA notes. Alas winCE was choosen. Then got to work on a music project. Hoping to get Interval to opensource much of the work that was done there.
craig.latta "at" netjam.org

Robert Withers is a physic student, but of course does computer work for a living like a graphical artwork program to make T-shirts. Then he decided to pursue a comp degree. Found Smalltalk. Did work in VisualBanker at IBM. Then worked on his masters. Now working on JWARS projects, also working with the 4th estate people.
withers "at" vnet.net

David Caster does communications tools, software translators. Got involved in Smalltalk in the late 80's Broke one of the first GC, really it's true. Now at the 4th estate working on software instrumentation. Some real cool tools. We should have a plugable instrumentation package for the VM.
John-Reed Maffeo, pointed out work on call backs to the VM and the need for it. However it's very difficult but think XML & RPC [see SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), Andreas Kuckartz]
Laurence reflected on Orbs and distributed Smalltalk. Communication and presentation of material is key to success.
david_caster "at" 4thEstate.com

{Some people arrived Sunday their intro will follow}

Bear with me, a lack of sleep prevented me from capturing all the information, would the folks below please fill in the blanks, and apologies to the Vancouver folks since I managed to miss all their introductions.

Vassili Bykov
vassili "at" objectpeople.com
(Vassili is a really smart guy and a terrific instructor for The Object People! He writes excellent articles for the Smalltalk Chronicles site http://www.smalltalkchronicles.com. And he does fun things like show cartoons on his laptop! ;-) Carl Gundel PS: Sheesh, you'd think I was starting a Vassili fan club or something!).

Gale Pedowitz
Gale has been a tinkerer, a system administrator, and a physics nerd in various past lives. She's now fiddling with Squeak.
http://www.ungeek.com



Serge Fenev
sfenev "at" smartt.com

Gem Demagajes
smalltalker "at" programmer.net

Nick Melnikov
kmhitech "at" home.com

Alex Pidgorny
kmhitech "at" home.com