the lineage of visualworks goes back to the first smalltalk-80 implementation by xerox parc. in the late 1980s, a group of smalltalk-80 developers spun off parcplace systems to further develop smalltalk-80 as a commercial product. the commercial product was initially called objectworks, and then visualworks. on august 31, 1999, the visualworks product was sold to cincom. visualworks runs under many operating systems, including windows, mac os x, linux, and several versions of unix.