Hello Hans My opinion is that you waste your time trying to find a smalltalk 80 just because you were used to it. Its like me returning back to GWBASIC which is the first programming language I learned to use back in 1988. Why use something so old that cant take advantage of new technology and new software ? It will only make suffer and limit you in many diffirent ways.
Pharo is a modern implementation of smalltalk it does not try to stick to the past it prefers to embrace the future of smalltalk. Morphic is what Pharo has inherited from Squeak and is by far the most dominant and most mature GUI API of Pharo. New kids in the block graphic wise is Spec , Athens and Roassal.The only common amongst those three is that they are no GUI APIs but they are graphic libraries Spec is wrapper above GUI APIs currently it wraps only Morphic and makes it easier to create complex GUIs. Unlike Morphic however has a steep learning curve but pharoers prefer it because it is easier to manage. Spec documentation is in a dedicate site (Just google "spec pharo" and you will find it) and in Pharo For The Enterprise book. Athens is also similarly to spec a wrapper above vector graphics libraries , currently it wraps the cairo libraries and can mix with Morphic . Athens docs are in Pharo For The Enterprise book plus there is a athens interactive tutorial in smalltalkhub Roassal is part of the moose tools a collection of tools for the visualisation and organisation of code. Roassal is also a wrapper above graphic libraries , it wraps both Morphic and Athens and it has also some GUI classes . Roassal documentation is in Deep Into Pharo and I think it has a chapter in Pharo for the Enterprise. Agains all these doc are easily revealed with a simple google search. GUI wise I will say that Morphic is still the undisputed king and Spec becomes slowly very popular as a way to manage Morphic easily. There is also a new and only Morphic replacement in the works that is called Bloc but I have not tested to provide information about it. So both Morphic and Spec are viable options. Obviously Morphic is more documented because of Squeak but Spec is more actively developed right now in Pharo. Whatever you pick any problems you have you ask here and you get your questions answered and you can also ask at stackoverflow if you have already an account there. There are also other GUI and Graphic libraries inside Pharo and outside Pharo , Pharo like squeak comes with several FFIs that allows you to use external C / C++ library (C++ libraries will have to be wrapped as C libraries) which this alone give you access to pretty much every GUI libraries that popular languages use. JNIPORT is Smalltalk library that allow Pharo to use Java libraries so you can also use Swing. I am also working on a way to allow Pharo to use Python libraries , I was partly successful into creating QT GUIs via pyQT which is the python wrappers for QT GUI API . QT is probably the most powerful GUI library out and so much more than that. So in reality you have like a ton of options , everything comes with its advantages and disadvantages but for now Morphic and Spec should be enough for your needs.
