From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: david@kdbarto.org (David) Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2016 15:55:17 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] Algol68 vs. C at Bell Labs / Pascal In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <47BC1783-6192-4C1B-8CBA-249ABF736ADB@kdbarto.org> > On Jun 30, 2016, at 10:27 AM, schily at schily.net (Joerg Schilling) > Marc Rochkind 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