1 Jul
2016
1 Jul
'16
4:55 a.m.
On Jun 30, 2016, at 10:27 AM, schily(a)schily.net (Joerg
Schilling)
Marc Rochkind <rochkind(a)basepath.com> wrote:
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
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