Alan Key created Smalltalk ("programming should be a matter of smalltalk") in 1971 at the famous Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). The Smalltalk implementation went through several releases before being made available outside Xerox Parc in 1980 (Smalltalk-80). Several commercial Smalltalk systems were developed during the next two decades, the most successful ones by Parc Place (Xerox's Smalltalk spinoff) IBM. Although considered a very productive development environment by many, Smalltalk never caught on as expected. One reason (besides the price tag of the commercial implementations) is probably the lack of a standard which means that Smalltalk programs can not be easily ported from one Smalltalk implementation to another. The advent of Java (and later C#) further dimished Smalltalk's market share.
We use GNU Smalltalk (gst) as the test implementation. For the UNIX people, it is just the configure/make procedure using the latest version (at the time of this writing 2.0.11) of GNU Smalltalk downloaded from ftp.gnu.org/smalltalk. On Windows I've used cygwin, but couldn't compile the new version successfully. For the examples, I'm now using the last 1.x version, namely 1.95.12. For a successful compile I had to remove the tcp and example targets from the Makefile. Starting the gst command line application without options will give you plenty of diagnostics for each executed statement. It get quieter with the "-q" option (or even "-Q").
$ ./gst.exe -q GNU Smalltalk Ready st>