If you missed this as the PPDT conference you can find the powerpoint presentation on their web page along with others from the 1996 conference at Disney Land. Some fellow Smalltalkers, senior ones at that, think Smalltalk as a Server is a novel concept. Being a naive developer I didn't think so at the time... But on the other hand Smalltalk didn't let me down and the project was successful. Yes you can run a Smalltalk image for months at a time and have it perform repetitive task to complete some business process at hand. Remember GC is your friend, finalization is cool and the ability to perform reflection on a running image is beyond words. (Also beyond all rules of proper production code management so don't do this at a client). 

Oct 1999. See the presentation at http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com/papers/PPDT1996/index.htm

-- JohnMcIntosh