VMs

2025-04-23

Paul Tarvydas

Apr 23, 2025

Some background re. the development of early VMs (Virtual Machines):

P-code (1973-1974)

- Developed by Niklaus Wirth and team at ETH Zurich

- Released as part of the Pascal-P system

- First major VM designed specifically for portability across different architectures

Tiny BASIC VM (1975-1976)

- Developed by Homebrew Computer Club members

- Released in response to the commercialization of BASIC

- Published in Dr. Dobb's Journal (Li-Chen Wang's version) in May 1976

Smalltalk-80 VM (1980)

- Developed at Xerox PARC by Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Adele Goldberg, and team

- First publicly available release of Smalltalk

- Earlier versions existed internally at Xerox PARC since the early 1970s

Relative Timing

P-code came first (early 1970s)
Tiny BASIC VM followed a few years later (mid-1970s)
Smalltalk-80 VM was released last (1980), though its development had been ongoing since the early 1970s

These VMs represent important milestones in the evolution of portable code execution environments that eventually led to modern VMs like the JVM and .NET CLR.

Tiny Basic

Smalltalk Blue Book containing Part Four which was later removed due to business concerns.

Programming Simplicity

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