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Sam S. Adams
Last updated at 3:28 pm UTC on 6 October 2008
I first saw Smalltalk-80 on a Tektronix 4404 when I joined Tektronix in 1984.

It changed my life and redirected my professional career.

After a couple of years at Tektronix, I moved to North Carolina and helped found Knowledge Systems Corporation with Reed Phillips.

After about 8 years of helping advance the commercial cause of Smalltalk via tools development, education and consulting, I left KSC to join Tom Love, then a VP at IBM, to found the Object Technology Practice. This group flourished for a couple of years at the height of Smalltalk's first wave of commerical popularity. After a few more years working in various parts of IBM, I returned to IBM Research to focus on what I call "semantic processing". This project, code-named "Joshua Blue", is inteded to emulate human cognitive development and performance from roughly conception through 3 years of age. We intend this system to one day be able to pass a "Toddler Turing Test" that will demonstrate the acquisiiton and exploitation of common sense reasoning at the level of a 3 year-old child including language, cordination, planning, anticipation, emotion, and creativity.

UPDATE
After a several year foray into Javascript, Web 2.0 and mashup technology, I have returned to more exploratory research, starting the Renaissance Project at IBM Research to search for a new programming model suitable for massively multicore processors. Along with Dave Ungar, we have constructed a Squeak "multi-vm" a Squeak VM adapted to run on 56 of the 64 cores on the Tilera64.


Thank you, thank you, thank you to Squeak Central and the community for returning Smalltalk to its wonderful roots as a truly personal computing environment for the future!