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

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

[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

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

[David]

> Ronald Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com>
> 
>> 
>> On the other hand, there was
>> no excuse for a Pascal compiler to be either large, buggy, or slow, even before Turbo Pascal.
>> 
> I remember the Pascal computer on my Apple II used to have to use some of the video memory while it was running.

UCSD Pascal, the Apple Pascal base, would grab the video memory as space to write the heap when compiling. When the Terak system was in use at UCSD the video memory would display on the screen so you could watch the heap grow down the screen while the stack crawled up when compiling. If it ever hit in the middle, you had a crash. Exciting times.

Terak systems were 11/03 based, IIRC. (http://www.threedee.com/jcm/terak/)

	David

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

[William Cheswick]

Shades of the BLIT loading.

> On 30Jun 2016, at 7:00 PM, David <david at kdbarto.org> wrote:
> 
> compiling. When the Terak system was in use at UCSD the video memory would display on the screen so you could watch the heap grow down the screen while the stack crawled up when compiling. If it ever hit in the middle, you had a crash. Exciting times.