Hi Ben,

> On Aug 25, 2016, at 3:15 PM, Ben Coman <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> On Thu, Aug 25, 2016 at 4:50 PM, Tudor Girba <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> We are very happy to make the following announcement:
>> 
>> 
>> Lam Research, a leading supplier of wafer fabrication equipment and services 
>> to the global semiconductor industry, is an experienced user of the 
>> Smalltalk programming language. Smalltalk is a key component in Lam's 
>> software control system for a broad range of the equipment it manufactures. 
>> Tudor Girba is a leading member of the tools and environment development 
>> effort in Pharo, having architected the Glamorous Toolkit for live 
>> programming. Eliot Miranda is author of the Cog virtual machine that 
>> underlies Pharo and other Smalltalk dialects.
>> 
>> Lam has engaged Tudor and Eliot to explore potential enhancements in Lam's 
>> use of Smalltalk. These enhancements range from running
>> highly optimized Smalltalk on low cost, single board computers
> to enhancing Lam's Smalltalk development practices with
> state-of-the-art live programming. During the engagement, Tudor and
> Eliot successfully moved a key communication component of the control
> system to Pharo. It was a challenging task aimed at extending the
> reach of Lam’s system to the Pharo world including the option of
> executing on ARM processors.
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> Tudor Girba, Eliot Miranda and Chris Thorgrimsson
> 
> Great to hear of this - particularly since I guess some(much?) of it
> was dealing with proprietary systems.  I'll understand if you can't
> answer the following questions in detail. I'm interested in:
> * what model was the single board computers?

Raspberry Pi 2.

> Or what were its
> specs/price?  Or how much of your experience might carry over to a
> board like the BeagleBone Black, particularly wrt to embedded control
> via it Programmable Real-time Unit.

I see no reason why it would t carry across without change.

> * did the communication component involve a proprietary protocol?  Or
> one of the industry standard "process automation" protocols listed
> here[1] ?

The protocol is proprietary, but there are other equivalent open protocols in 
the Smalltalk space.  See eg Seamless and Denis Kudriasov's protocol used with 
it for his remote debugger work.

> 
> [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automation_protocols
> 
> cheers -ben
> 

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