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. 
30 Jun
30 Jun
7:18 p.m.
New subject: Algol68 vs. C at Bell Labs
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.
On 30Jun 2016, at 9:15 AM, David
<david(a)kdbarto.org> wrote:
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. 
7:39 p.m.
New subject: Algol68 vs. C at Bell Labs
On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 9:18 AM, William Cheswick <ches(a)cheswick.com> wrote:
What a different world it would be if IBM had selected
the M68000
Blame that on Moto, not IBM. IBM wanted the 68K. But Moto kept pushing
the 6809 on them. IBM and Tek were two of the sites that had the
experimental chip that I was referring. My friend Les Crudele related the
story of IBM visiting Austin (Les and Nick Tredenick were the primary 68K
guys). It seems IBM wanted to use the new chip and Moto marketing kept
telling them it was an experiment and was not a product. The cool new
product from Moto was the 6809 and they should use that. IBM knew they
wanted a 16bit processor which it was not, so they looked elsewhere.
Then again, I might have my current job if Moto marketing not been so short
sighted.
Clem
PS BTW: Les has equally great stories about working with Apple BTW. My
favorite is that he says, Moto tried to get Apple to put a MMU into the
original Mac, but Job's would not hear of it. Not needed for a PC and all
that.
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days inactive
2874
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2 comments
3 participants
participants (3)
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Clem Cole -
David -
William Cheswick