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Showing posts from November, 2017

Emulating Smalltalk-76

If you got as excited as me about Dan Ingalls' live Smalltalk-76 demo on an actual 1970's Xerox Alto, you may have wanted to try it yourself.  For one, you could try my Smalltalk-78 VM. Smalltalk-78 is a leaner version of Smalltalk-76 but very much identical in syntax semantics.  It is also possible to run the full Smalltalk-76 environment, and here is how: First, you need an emulator for the Alto computer. Ken Shiriff posted a nice piece on how to run ContrAlto on Windows . It is written in C# and I got it to work on my Mac using Mono. So here's a step-by-step: Install Mono from  http://www.mono-project.com/download/ Download ContrAlto-mono.zip from https://github.com/livingcomputermuseum/ContrAlto/releases Download this Smalltalk-76 disk image: http://www.bitsavers.org/bits/Xerox/Alto/disk_images/chm/xmsmall.zip Unzip both  ContrAlto-mono.zip  and  xmsmall.zip  in the same folder. In a terminal, change to the ContrAlto directory and run...