I have been a spectator in the Smalltalk world since the first articles appeared in the "Peoples' Computer Company" tabloid around 25 years ago.
I became an active participant when I bought QKS Smalltalk Agents at a MacWorld in Boston when I was out of work and needed something to keep my brain alive.
Squeak is a whole new wonderful world for me. I am working with Tim Rowledge to make it work on the Psion Series 5 pocket computer, out of purely selfish reasons. I am committed to maintaining and documenting the port, as well as creating PDA applications in Squeak.
I am one of those people who can't walk past a complex system without needing to find out how it works. Squeak should keep me busy for a few years.
I am attracted to Squeak because of its elegance. I am attracted to the Squeak Project because there are Giants here. I don't know if I will ever become a Giant myself, but it will please me if I can make a small contribution here.
I recently became interested in the teaching of Smalltalk (particularly Squeak) as a first programming language as an alternative to C or Visual Basic. If I end up writing an introductory text, I will post the drafts to the Swiki for your enjoyment and feedback. My heartfelt thanks to many of you for your encouragement, particularly to Mark Guzdial and Ralph Johnson! Please don't expect anything for a few weeks, because I am waiting until my wife Pam finishes her current classes before I recruit her as my first "guinea pig". I promised I would pay her way to OOPSLA '99 if she finishes a significant project before the conference begins.
I have a somewhat primitive web site at http://www.luwish.com. Creating and maintaining content on one's own web site is more work than most people realize (at least more than I did) and unless one is willing to live their entire life in cyberspace, becoming a "web star" is rather remote. If I can get a Wiki server to run in the shell account I have with my ISP, I can get other people to create content for me :-)
I can be reached at home at mailto:ed@luwish.com or at work at mailto:eluwish@uswest.com
