[TUHS] Algol68 vs. C at Bell Labs / Pascal

[david@kdbarto.org (David)]

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> On Jun 30, 2016, at 10:27 AM, schily at schily.net (Joerg Schilling)
> Marc Rochkind <rochkind at basepath.com> wrote:
> 
>> Bill Cheswick: "What a different world it would be if IBM had selected the
>> M68000 and UCSD Pascal.  Both seemed
>> to me to better better choices at the time."
>> 
>> Not for those of us trying to write serious software. The IBM PC came out
>> in August, 1981, and I left Bell Labs to write software for it full time
>> about 5 months later. At the time, it seemed to me to represent the future,
>> and that turned out to be a correct guess.
> 
> I worked on a "Microengine" in 1979.
> 
> The Microengine was a micro PDP-11 with a modified micro code ROM that directly 
> supported to execute p-code.
> 
> The machine was running a UCSD pascal based OS and was really fast and powerful.
> 
> Jörg

Very likely one of the Western Digital products. They were the first to take UCSD Pascal and burned the p-code interpreter into the ROM. Made for a blindingly fast system. I worked with the folks who did the port and make it all play together. Fun days.

I worked on the OS and various utility programs those days. Nothing to do with the interpreters.

When the 68000 came out SofTech did a port of the system to it. Worked very well; you could take code compiled on the 6502 system write it to a floppy, take the floppy to the 68k system and just execute the binary. It worked amazingly well.

	David