The Story of Squeak

The Squeak Community

As exciting as the day the interpreter first ran, was the day we released Squeak to the Internet community. In the back of our minds, we all felt that we were finally doing, in September of 1996, what we had failed to do in 1980. However, the code we released ran only on the Macintosh and, although we had worked hard to make it portable, we did not know if we had succeeded.

Three weeks later, we received a message announcing Ian Piumarta's first UNIX port of Squeak. He had ported it to seven additional UNIX platforms two weeks later. At the same time, Andreas Raab announced ports of Squeak for Windows 95 and Windows NT. Neither of these people had even contacted us before starting their porting efforts! A mere five weeks after it was released, Squeak was available on all the major computing platforms except Windows 3.1, and had an active and rapidly growing mailing list. Since that time, Squeak ports have been done for Linux, the Acorn RISC, and Windows CE, and several other ports are underway.

The Squeak release, including the source code for the virtual machine, C translator and everything else described in this paper, as well as all the ports mentioned above, is available through the following sites: (<http://www.research.apple.com/research/proj/learning_concepts/squeak/>) <ftp://ftp.create.ucsb.edu> <ftp://alix.inria.fr> <ftp://ftp.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/pub/ Smalltalk/free/squeak>

The Squeak license agreement explicitly grants the right to use Squeak in commercial applications royalty-free. The only requirement in return is that any ports of Squeak or changes to the base class library must be made available for free on the Internet. New applications and facilities built on Squeak do not need to be shared. We believe that this licensing agreement encourages the continued development and sharing of Squeak by its user community.