Thanks for digging this up, and for sharing. I installed it on my VAXstation 2000/GPX, running MicroVMS 4.7. It's... not a very polished product, is it? It drops to the debugger, for example, if it tries to draw into its window when any part of it is obscured by some other window. (Saving a snapshot also crashes with a DIGITAL-only opcode exception, but this doesn't happen on my 3100m76 so perhaps it's something specific to the uVAX II processor.)
Which brings me to what I wanted to ask you - is the UI ungodly slow for you? Like at least three or four seconds, sometimes 10 or more, redrawing screen objects one. at. a. time. every time you click the mouse or type a character in a window? It's even worse for the browser window, where there are 40 or so objects and it takes 20-30 seconds. I have the sense that under the covers the VAX Smalltalk-80 is reasonably quick, but the UI performance is intolerable. And incredibly, it's not noticeably faster on the 3100m76 (though it's clear that under the covers, computationally, non-ui stuff is about as much faster as one might expect). I wondered if it might be a color vs. monochrome graphics thing, but again, switching from the SPX to the monochrome display on the m76 only brings a barely noticeable improvement.
It struck me that there was no way that Alan Kay or Dan Ingalls would have tolerated UI performance like this through years of active development on the system, but it wasn't until I saw Dan's Alto Smalltalk-76 demo for CHM on YouTube that I was able to confirm - yeah, the Alto is much, much faster than the VAX, at least in the UI. It kind of made me doubly sour about DEC's complaint in the "Bits of History" paper that nobody would want to use Smalltalk because it's so slow --- I can't help but think, "yeah, and it's your fault, you muppets."
There are a few other things that struck me as odd, starting with the apparent inability to interact with the VMS filesystem for fileIn: or fileOutOn: type tasks. Do I have it right that it can only work with a disk-image type file, which itself is a container for all Smalltalk files?
The thing also slowly corrupts the offscreen storage of fonts on the VS2k, so after some time you can no longer use the terminal windows and have to (blindly) reboot to get them back. But this isn't unique to Smalltalk; other non-terminal UIS applications (such as SIGHT) do the same -- just an awesome "feature" of this old version of VWS (3.2 or 3.3 IIRC).