The Story of Squeak, a Practical Smalltalk Written in Itself (1997) [pdf]

I was very excited by Squeak in the late 90s (and even more excited by Self), but it was clear that the time of Smalltalk being able to make any kind of broader splash was done, and Java was where people's attention switched.

Perhaps the most immediately shocking feature of Squeak is the "world" which relates to the principle:

> Operating System: An operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a language. There shouldn't be one.

This means all Squeak programs live in their own, entirely Squeak based, virtual machine. This was, understandably, off putting to many devs since you can't bring any of your local tooling with you, but it had some interesting consequences. For starters, way back in the early 2000s, you could keep your Squeak image on a thumb drive and bring your entire dev environment with you to not only different computers, but different OSes! Then, in the Squeak window system, you could view the source of any arbitrary window or part of the gui.

Squeak, despite the small community, has some really novel software. Monticello was a dvcs that predated git! There were also a proper object graph database, GemStone, that could be used for object persistence that, at least from an interface level, still beats any ORM we have today. There was also a feature that allowed method lookup by putting in the inputs and expected outputs (I still haven't seen anything like this).

In general learning about the history of Smalltalk interactively really drove home how incredibly novel of a system is was, and still remains in someways today.

0. https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/smalltalk....

Squeak was bootstrapped from Macintosh Smalltalk-80 and the kernel was in C to make it portable. Related projects to squeak are etoys, scratch and lively (2).

(1) https://vpri.org/ (2) https://computerhistory.org/profile/dan-ingalls-2/