Happy 28th Birthday to Squeak! | The Weekly Squeak
It was 28 years ago today when an email was sent to comp.lang.smalltalk by Dan Ingalls with the subject “Squeak – A Usable Smalltalk Written in Itself,” marking the first announcement of Squeak to the world. In his email, Dan announced the release of Squeak with the intent to promote collaboration with academia and industry. Squeak began on a reconditioned Smalltalk-80 system from Apple’s ST-80. Notably, the implementation was written almost entirely in Smalltalk. Beginning with the Blue Book spec, a 32-bit direct pointer Object Memory and incremental garbage collection was added. Additionally it included a color BitBlt, a portable file system, and basic support for polyphonic music synthesis. Contributions were welcome, and the rest, well, is ongoing history.
We would like to acknowledge the invaluable contributions of all who have supported the project. In celebration of this milestone, we reached out to several current contributors, who then also shared this request with others to gather their thoughts on this occasion.
