osmo-st-* projects

Hello there! The question out of curiosity. Hard to not notice quite a few of projects written in Smalltalk. Why was cellular network implementation in Smalltalk abandoned? Or was everything in C initially and you just tried out Smalltalk as a possible alternative? What was your thinking back then? Interested to know some history. Thanks a lot! P.S. of course, I see some stuff in Erlang as well, but it has an awesome Diameter support which kind of answers a similar question but related to Erlang.