Re: A 21st Century Apple II?

[Leif Strand <leif@geodynamics.org>]

On Thu, 05 Mar 2009 03:35:22 -0800, apple2freak wrote:
> I'm betting that Smalltalk should be possible.  It was, after all,
> designed by Alan Kay in the early 1970s, so I doubt it needs that many
> computing resources to run.

Bear in mind that Smalltalk was ahead of its time in many ways...
including the amount of computing resources it requires :-)

I distinctly remember running a Smalltalk implementation on my Apple IIgs
back in the day.  It was glacially slow -- even "1 + 2" at the prompt
resulted in a noticible pause before the answer came back.  OTOH, it was
probably Tim Budd's "Little Smalltalk", which is not a good data point
because it's written in C.  One would have to implement the intepreter in
assembly to get decent performance.

I've been reading chapters of "Bits of History, Word of Advice" lately. My
sense from reading that book is that it would be foolish to implement
ST-80 on anything less than a Mac Plus.  So I wouldn't even attempt an
8-bit Apple II implementation.  Not sure about the IIgs, though.  The
memory architecture would be adequate (in fact, I think ST-80 has been
implemented on segmented memory arches before).  But my gut feeling is
that a stock 65816 would come up short in terms of speed and number of
registers.  One would need/want an accelerator.

--Leif Strand