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Dwight Hughes has published on his web site a number of the key articles about Smalltalk design, and implementation. A number of things can be found there like the missing chapter on the Implementation of Smalltalk from the reprinted Smalltalk-80: The Language book. In fact I recall talking to someone who took the original book which include the implementation and built a Smalltalk VM based on that chapter.
Mr Hughes also has the text of Dan Ingalls Smalltalk-76 Design and Implementation. A real gem, for example lurking in the material on Smalltalk-76 is a picture of a painting progam, something the rest of the world wouldn't be exposed to until 1984.
If implementation triggers your interest then see Smalltalk-80, Bits of History, Words of Advice on our smalltalk book page and David Michael Ungar's paper "The Design and Evaluation of A High Performance Smalltalk System"
Finally the true word on the early history of Smalltalk comes from Alan C. Kay. This material is mostly available at the acm.org site, (members only) but is incomplete as compared to the material in the History of Programming Languages book.The material in this book goes for 89 pages versus 54 at the acm.org site.
Now the tide has turned and we are back to the future: The Story of Squeak But do you need an draft version of the ANSI Smalltalk Standard.
Everyone knows who David Ungar is (in fact you can view his paper "The Design and Evaluation of A High Performance Smalltalk System"), but who is Frank Jackson
What is An adaptive tenuring policy for generation scavengers
or who is Barry Hayes, or what are George Bosworth's Ephemerons, or what about Garbage Collection Latency.
These answers are forthcoming