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From: rej@cornell.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.lang.st80
Subject: A real Smalltalk product announcement
Message-ID: <175@cornell.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 8-Aug-84 21:11:15 EDT
Article-I.D.: cornell.175
Posted: Wed Aug  8 21:11:15 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 9-Aug-84 04:52:10 EDT
Sender: rej@cornell.UUCP
Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept.
Lines: 39

From: rej (Ralph Johnson)
The following announcement was taken from the August 6'th edition of
Electronics Week, and was probably taken from a Tektronix advertising
blurb.  Is this the "Magnolia" that I have heard mentioned?

	A $14,950 computer that runs the Smalltalk-80 programming language
	marks Tektronix' entrance into the artificial intelligence market.
	To hit the market early next year, the 4404 Artificial Intelligence
	System is designed to increase productivity in many areas of AI
	research and development, including expert systems, natural languages
	intelligent robotics, vision systems, automatic programming, and
	theorem proving.

	The standard 4404 is a desktop system built around a 10-Mz 68010
	processor with no wait states.  A hardware accelertor supports
	floating-point opertions.  The 1 megabyte of random-access memory
	provided can be doubled.  Page-on-demand memory management provides a
	large, 8-megabyte virtual memory address space tht permits users to
	develop complex programs without segmentation or overlays.  The mass
	storage system consists of a 20-megabyte Winchester disk drive, a
	5 1/4 floppy disk drive, and an optional streaming tape drive.

	The 4404's monochorme bit-mapped graphics display is refreshed at a
	60-Hz rte, noninterlaced.  The 640-by-480-pixel display acts a
	window into the 1,024-by-1,024-pixel display address space.  A
	mouse comes with the system.

	Optional programming languages - Lisp and Prolog - and networking
	capabilities will be available next spring.

This sounds like it might be a good Smalltalk engine, but I am surprised
at the emphasis placed on AI.  Do the people at Xerox use Smalltalk to do
AI?  Do they have a bunch of AI specific tools, or has Tektronix developed
them, or is this just usual advertising hype?  If the 4404 is really a good
AI machine, then one answer to the question of what Smalltalk is good for
is obvious.

Ralph Johnson