A very interesting fellow, and a good person to know. He founded his own Smalltalk compiler company in the early 80's, then worked as a manager at Apple on the Mac App project. After that he became the vice-president and COO of Knowledge Systems Corporation. From 1995 - 2005 he was a senior researcher/developer/deep-thinker at IBM. Now he is an independent consultant.
Steve formed Soft Smarts with Abdul Nabi. I believe that they produced the first Xerox-independent Smalltalk system - pre Digitalk. Xerox/PARC didn't like this and sat on them. --Peter Goodall
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Softsmarts was founded by Robert Roessler and myself in 1985. Jerry Latter (now CIO of Rockefeller University) joined next and then Abdul Nabi.
We first did a Lisp port which sank like a stone, then moved on to Smalltalk.
Softsmarts produced the first fully Xerox compliant Smalltalk-80 for the IBM PC-AT, which we called Smalltalk-AT (say it out loud...clever, huh?).
Robert Roessler did most of the work on the virtual machine. I focused on the Smalltalk image modifications and writing documentation (e.g., the paper on MVC which is now widely cited, see Google, and has been translated into Russian).
Smalltalk-AT came out about the same time as Digitalk's "Methods" (at the first OOPSLA in 1986) which predated Digitalk Smalltalk by a year or so.
Due to royalty agreements with Xerox, Softsmarts could not compete with Digitalk's $100 pricing. Xerox (by then Parc Place) thought the proper price point was $1000, not $100. The market agreed with Digitalk.
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See original on c2.com 