Welcome to Bots Inc! BotsInc is the environment of the book Squeak: Learn Programming with Robots. With Bots Inc you will learn how to program robots in an interactive environment. Bots Inc proposes three teaching approaches: direct command of robots, scripting robots and programming robots. The book contains 24 chapters going step by step over topics with a lot of examples. Bots Inc is fun but it is not a toy, it teaches you 100% real programming. Bots Inc is built on top of the rich open-source multimedia Squeak environment. If you are interested in programming, I suggest to have a look at our new exciting project Pharo and its companion book PharoByExample.

My goal is to explain key elementary programming concepts (such as loops, abstraction, composition, and conditionals) to novices of all ages. I believe that learning by experimenting and solving problems with fun is central to human knowledge acquisition. Therefore, I have presented programming concepts through simple but not trivial problems such as drawing golden rectangles or simulating animal behavior. The ideal reader I have in mind is an individual who wants to have fun programming. This person may be a teenager or an adult, a schoolteacher, or somebody teaching programming to children in some other organization. Such an individual does not have to be fluent in programming in any language. As a father of two young boys I also wrote this book for all the parents that want to have fun programming with their kids in a powerful interactive environment. Programming in Squeak is an interactive, fun but deep experience. The present book teaches elementary programming concepts, the following book will introduce a new fun environment and teach object-oriented programming. The second edition was released in November 2005.

Apparently, the link from squeak.org is pointing in the wrong place, but I also wanted to raise the visibility of this fascinating tutorial again.

But PARC is also famous because the products and profits associated with these breakthroughs arrived through other companies. Steve Jobs and Apple are credited with introducing the first commercial GUI workstations: the Lisa and the Mac. Bill Gates and Microsoft gave us Windows on x86 PCs. 3Com successfully exploited Ethernet. And profits from laser printers flowed to Cannon, Lexmark, and Hewlett-Packard.

Worse for PARC: 3Com, Adobe, and Digital Equipment Corp were formed by former PARC staffers who'd left out of frustration with PARC's direction and unwillingness to realize their inventions. Meanwhile, Apple and Microsoft hired away other brains. Alan Kay, who'd built the world's first object-oriented programming language, SmallTalk, went to Apple, while a fresh-faced Charles Simonyi, who'd worked on PARC's WYSIWYG interface, left to join Microsoft, where he gave us Word and Excel and helped Gates become one of the world's richest men.

At ESUG, the GemStone/S team announced that the free web edition of GemStone/S has had its limits raised. Maximum repository size is now 16GB (up from 4), shared page cache is 2GB (up from 1), CPU limit is 2 (up from 1), and the limit on the total number of objects in the repository has been eliminated. So if it was possible to fit ‘em in 16GB, you could keep track of 2^40 objects (approx. 1 trillion).

This is very cool!