IBM has signed a royalty-free licence deal with ParcPlace Systems Inc of Mountain View, California for the use of the SmallTalk language and the description of the essential base classes of objects – IBM has used Smalltalk before by incorporating Digitalk Inc’s SmallTalk/v PM into its range of OS/2 tools, to encourage programs to be written for Presentation Manager (CI No 1,443): in a separate agreement ParcPlace Systems is working with IBM to make Objectworks/Smalltalk available for the RS/6000 in February 1991 – this product enables programmers to develop applications on the RS/6000 and deploy them immediately on PS/2 under Windows 3.0; ironically, SmallTalk is one of the bulkier object-oriented languages and is not as popular as C++ among developers – but then C++ is AT&T’s baby and so one assumes IBM could not endorse it.
