The current project was started in 1992, as very little of the developments which started in 1984 and 1989 could be effectively used ( though, of course, the experience gained was very valuable ).
Year | the Project | Related Events |
---|---|---|
1981 | In a way, the starting point for Merlin was the August issue of Byte magazine about the Smalltalk-80 object oriented language. It showed that computers could be made simple ( and even fun ) to use - very different from the CP/M style computers that were popular back then. IBM introduced the PC | |
1983 | The idea of a Smalltalk-like computer for the masses went from day dreaming to action when the Pegasus Project ( which developed a computer for children and schools ) was started. A microkernel, message passing Unix project was started at LSI - USP ( project SINDE ) Apple introduced the Lisa, making Windows and Mice industry buzzwords | |
1984 | It became clear that using Pegasus as a scaled down version of the more ambitious goals was resulting in a unsatisfactory hybrid, the project was split in two ( Pegasus died out a little later ), with the Smalltalk computer renamed to Merlin Several alternatives were considered for the hardware and a bytecode-less Smalltalk was designed. Later the Smalltalk method names were translated to Portuguese and the "blue book" implementation was translated to C. | The Brazilian Congress transformed the "Reserved Market Policy" into a law by an almost unanimous vote Apple introduced the Macintosh, the "computer for the rest of us" |
1985 | The Merlin I prototype was designed and built | Digitalk introduced Methods, the first commercial Smalltalk ( for the PC ) |
1986 | "Inova Tecnologia e Informatica" was founded in association with Softec ( a leading PC maker in Brazil ) to develop Merlin The Merlin II prototype was built in record time | |
1987 | Merlin OS, a very simple operating system, was written to help debug Smalltalk on the Merlin II The Merlin III was designed and built. It was a dual bus 68020 machine - it had both NuBus and 8 bit PC slots First a QNX port to Merlin III was canceled as well as the Smalltalk effort, being replaced by new OS design written in an Objective-C like language. Then the hardware project was scrapped, and the software was moved to the PC AT | Xerox spin-off Parcplace was created to finally do something about Smalltalk "Self: The Power of Simplicity" paper was published at OOPSLA |
1988 | The association with Softec came to an end | |
1989 | The project was restarted at LSI - USP. | |
1990 | The detailed design of Merlin IV was finished | Self 1.0 was released at Stanford |
1991 | A 64 node machine was built at LSI ( MS8702 ) The Self project moved to Sun | |
1992 | The project was restarted once again. This time as a "home-grown computer" | The "Reserved Market Policy" came to a eagerly awaited end Self 2.0 was released |
1993 | The Merlin IV Prototype runs its first programs the first lines of tinySelf in C were written on a DOS machine | Self 3.0 was released |
1994 | The first Merlin IV prototype stopped working ( the stress to the board of constantly replacing EPROMs proved to be a problem ). A second prototype was built Merlin's Web pages at LSI - USP let the world know about the project | |
1995 | Work on tinySelf was restarted, this time on Linux | Self 4.0 was released |
I would like to thank the people who have helped Merlin in the past: