Smalltalk-72 Redux
Smalltlak-72 is a beautiful language kernel. Ever since the experience of writing the Smalltlak-76 virtual machine in itself, I have wanted to return to Smalltalk-72 and demonstrate its simplicity with a metacircular interpreter. In other words, to have the Smalltalk-72 interpreter written (and running!) in Smalltalk-72 itself.
With this in mind, in early 2020 I wrote a new interpreter for Smalltalk-72 ("Redux") in the Lively Kernel JavaScript development system. At this point, Redux can read in the entire original Smalltalk-72 bootstrap, and it can display a squiral. It has a nearly unlimited object memory and it runs over 500 times the speed of the original Smalltalk-72 (!). You can run it at
St-72 Redux
If you are serious about playing with this, make sure to copy it to another page, and feel free to contact me about it.