Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!m.cs.uiuc.edu!p.cs.uiuc.edu!johnson
From: johnson@p.cs.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.lang.smalltalk
Subject: Re: Smalltalkers ???
Message-ID: <80500082@p.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 10 Dec 89 17:38:31 GMT
References: <9010001@hpqtdla.HP.COM>
Lines: 21
Nf-ID: #R:hpqtdla.HP.COM:9010001:p.cs.uiuc.edu:80500082:000:1153
Nf-From: p.cs.uiuc.edu!johnson    Dec  9 22:45:00 1989


The reason why people don't post responses to questions about public
domain Smalltalk's is because there aren't any.  Little Smalltalk
is public domain, but it does not have anything like the Smalltalk
user interface, which is a main feature of Smalltalk.  There is also
a Gnu project Smalltalk in the works, but there is no plans in the
near future for a graphical user interface.  Thus, there is nothing
that competes with the commercial Smalltalks.

There are basically two commercial Smalltalks.  ParcPlace has the
original Smalltalk-80.  It runs on Macs, 386 based machines, Suns,
HP machines, etc.  Digitalk has Smalltalk-V, which is pretty
compatible with Smalltalk-80 on the language level but not always on
the class level.  However, it has a nice interface, and runs on
Macs and PCs.  In general, ParcPlace Smalltalk is bigger and has 
more features, while Digitalk Smalltalk is cheaper and runs on smaller 
machines.  If you just want to fool around, you probably can only
afford the Digitalk Smalltalk unless you are at a school and can get
the academic discount from ParcPlace.  

Ralph Johnson -- University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign