Comment by jecel

The VM in Slang had been previously published as part of the "blue book" (now that is what I call open source!) some 14 years before, and as the paper you linked to mentioned, Mario Wolczko at the University of Manchester had typed it in so it was available in machine readable form.

They did drop the object memory part completely and designed a new one from scratch.

Previously people had manually translated the VM from Slang to Pascal or C (I did so myself in 1986) but for this project they wrote a tool for that (in Smalltalk, of course).

Here is another copy of the "Back to the Future" paper:

http://www.mirandabanda.org/files/Papers/BttF.html