30 Jun
2016
30 Jun
'16
7:15 p.m.
From: Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org>
On Wed, 29 Jun 2016, scj(a)yaccman.com wrote:
I was an active member of the UCSD Pascal project from 77 to 80, and then was with SofTech
MicroSystems for a couple years after that.
An unwritten legacy of the Project was that, according to Professor Ken Bowles, IBM wanted
to use UCSD Pascal as the OS for their new x86 based personal computer. The license was
never worked out as the University of California got overly involved in it. As a result
IBM went with their second choice, some small Redmond based company no one had ever heard
of. So it was intended and, at least IBM thought, it was good enough for production use.
I also knew of UCSD Pascal programs written to do things such as dentist office billing
and scheduling and other major ‘real world’ tasks. So it wasn’t just an academic project.
I still have UCSD Pascal capable of running in a simulator, though I’ve not run it in a
while. And I have all the source for the OS and interpreter for the Version I.5 and II.0
systems. Being a code pig just means that I need a lot of disk space.
David
Pascal had P-code, and gave C a real run,
especially as a teaching
language.
Something I picked up at Uni was that Pascal was never designed for
production use; instead; you debugged your algorithm in it, then ported it
to your language of choice.