The war of the workstations
Summary
They were OSes in their own right I started digging into that, and thats when the ground crumbled away, and I found that, like some very impressive CGI special effects, I wasnt excavating a graveyard but a whole, hidden, ruined city. Its a digest of a long-running internet community from the time when universities were getting rid of Lisp machines and replacing them with cheaper, faster Unix workstations – Sun boxes and things like that. An environment that is mostly semi-interpreted code, running in a single shared memory space, is not very stable ... and when it crashes, if you dont have a snapshot to go back to, you have pain in store. As original Smalltalk implementer Dan Ingalls put it: "An operating system is a collection of things that dont fit inside a language; there shouldnt be one." A cross-platform OS, its development sponsored by Bell Labs and refined at the University of California, compiled from source written in a cut-down form of BCPL.