Here is a long talk (more than 1 hour) I gave at the Smalltalks 2019 conference in Argentina about the history of Smalltalk computers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tATpzsyC6OA

and slides in PDF and LibreOffice formats:

http://www.merlintec.com/download/2019_slides_jecel_fast1v2....

http://www.merlintec.com/download/2019_slides_jecel_fast1v2....

This includes projects from various different groups as well as my own projects (which I should have clearly labeled as such).

The key events: from 1977 to 1992 Brazil had a "reserved market" policy that only allowed local companies to make and sell micro and minicomputers. After reading the 1981 Byte magazine about Smalltalk I wanted one, but by 1984 it was clear I would have to build my own. I toyed with the idea of designing my own processor (with TTLs) but went instead with the Motorola 68000 I had already used in other projects.

In 1986 I joined forces with Softec, which had launched the first PC clone in Brazil. Note that the reserved market thing kept the Macintosh out of the country (Apple was able to kill a local clone) so this would have been the only option for a graphical computer. This ended in 1988 after we had built several prototypes and operating systems. I had previously dropped out of the university so I went back to finish with a focus on chip design. In 1990 I got a scholarship to do an object oriented processor, but with the wonderful results the Self group at Stanford had with software JIT compilation I changed the project to be a modified Sparc. Even that got cancelled the next year in favor of a 64 node machine with 68020 processors (bought back in 1987) and I did research on parallel Smalltalk/Self on that.

People tried to convince me there was no longer any point in special hardware and that I should just do software for PCs instead. But in 1998 I was working on a digital cable TV project and came up with a VLIW MOVE processor that would be great for that but could also implement Smalltalk/Self very well. NEC was not interested in it but I thought it was too good to just drop it, so I left the university and set up a company to develop it.

The first products would have to use FPGAs since I didn't have funds for custom chips. Things went slowly since I had to do consulting. With the new Virtex II FPGAs there was enough internal RAM that it made more sense to have a bunch of small processors, each with a little cache, than a single large VLIW processor with external RAM as cache. Compiling for VLIW is not easy at all, as many people have found.

In 2007 I got into a master's program at a local university and in late 2008 I started to collaborate with a group that wanted to do a SqueakPhone and a Croquet cloud. To make it easier for us to work together I adapted a 2004 SqueakProcessor I had sketched into SiliconSqueak, optimized both for running bytecodes and as a target for JIT compilers.

This evolved over the years but with weak single core performance in favor of more cores per silicon area and better energy efficiency. Since late 2018 I have been developing version 5 of SiliconSqueak to have both a very high peak performance for a single thread and many slower threads depending on demand. And the adaptive compilation technology can not only handle bytecodes but efficiently simulate any processor (x86 binaries, for example).