Dr. Dobb's Journal October 2002
The first Smalltalk system—a 1000-line program written in Basic—was built 30 years ago in September, 1972. One month later, it was working well enough to perform simple addition, and an assembly-language implementation, Smalltalk-72, followed shortly thereafter.
Smalltalk was first explored as part of Xerox PARC's "Dynabook" project, which aimed to create notebook-style personal computers. Smalltalk was to be the Dynabook's programming environment. "I created a language called 'Smalltalk'—as in 'programming should be a matter of smalltalk' and 'children should program in smalltalk,'" explained Alan Kay in a 1981 special issue of BYTE magazine.
Smalltalk represented a breakthrough in object-oriented software design, introducing many programmers to a new paradigm. In the three decades since, Smalltalk has passed into many different versions, both commercial and open source. The language continues to evolve, as evidenced by the implementation of Squeak (http://www.squeak.org/), an open, highly portable Smalltalk-80 implementation with a virtual machine written entirely in Smalltalk.
More than a billion personal computers have been distributed since the days of the Simon and the Altair 8800, according to a report from Gartner Dataquest. Gartner's statistics indicate that the one-billionth PC shipped in April, 2002.
The report estimates that only 25 percent of "personal" computers were bought for home use; the other 75 percent were purchased by businesses. And although it took 25 years for the first billion PCs to be manufactured, Gartner predicts that another billion PCs will ship in the next six years—assuming that computer prices continue to drop.
"With the wealthy heart of the PC market consumed, PC manufacturers face the challenge of lowering costs to address opportunities in emerging markets, such as China, Latin America, and Eastern Europe," said Martin Reynolds, author of the report. For more information, see http://www4.gartner.com/5_about/press_releases/2002_07/pr20020701a.jsp.
The Honeynet Project (http://www.honeynet .org/) has posted results of its Reverse Challenge, which challenged participants to analyze a malicious binary installed on a compromised Honeynet system. First place went to Australian programmer Dion Mendel.
The binary turned out to have four functions: Once installed, it could perform three kinds of DNS attacks, and could provide a remote shell for attackers to use as a backdoor. It communicated over IP protocol 11, thereby evading network security tools configured to only monitor TCP, UDP, and ICMP traffic.
The Honeynet Project was established in 1999 to study the tools, methods, and motives of intruders; the Reverse Challenge is the most recent of several competitions that the project has sponsored. "It is a chance to test your skills," said Mendel.
The competitors each spent an average of 70 hours analyzing the binary; some of them developed their own tools in the process. The Honeynet Project estimates that the cost to a company analyzing a similar binary would be $3015.04 if an employee did the work: $28,000 if the job was contracted out.
"There are new tools that came out of this Challenge, some innovative techniques, and great examples of how to do a reverse analysis of an untrusted binary," said contest organizers.
Turing Award winner Edsger W. Dijkstra passed away on August 6, 2002, at his home in Neunen, the Netherlands.
Dijkstra, who was a professor emeritus in computer sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, was renowned for: the insight that mathematical logic is and must be the basis for sensible computer program construction; the idea of building operating systems as explicitly synchronized sequential processes; and the intellectual foundations for the disciplined control of nondeterminacy.
Dijkstra was also known for his shortest path algorithm and for having designed and coded the first ALGOL 60 compiler. While he published several books on mathematics and computer science, his more prolific writings were manuscripts (available at http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD) informally distributed to colleagues around the world.