50 Years of Pascal

[Kryvich 165]

50 Years of Pascal by Niklaus Wirth. (in Russian)

Edited February 25, 2021 by Kryvich

[FPiette 383]

I started to use Pascal in the beginning of '80. I don't remember the exact year but it was something like 1981.

At that time I used Pascal on a Motorola 68000 development system to build an image processing system for the industry.

I also used USCD Pascal but I don't remember the exact context.

Later I moved to C on microcomputers and then CP/M machines and the IBM-PC.

On the PC, I used Pascal MT+ at lot before using exclusively C for long time, actually until Delphi was born.

And much later, in 1995, I moved to Delphi that I still use today, every days.

 

Edited February 26, 2021 by FPiette

[David Schwartz 426]

This is a nice article, but it it makes it sound like USCD Pascal and TurboPascal were related and evolved together. And of all the stuff he mentions, they're all academic curiosities now. UCSD Pascal disappeared after TP was introduced, and TP evolved into Delphi. I don't think anybody ever sold Modula or Oberon compilers commercially (although that would have been really nice).

 

As I recall, UCSD Pascal was released about 18 months before I'd heard of TurboPascal, and there was a huge package of stuff included in it. I believe it was free.

 

When TurboPascal appeared, it was packaged as a small shrink-wrap book (8-1/2" x 5-1/2" x 1/4") with a floppy disk as I recall, priced at $49.95 that wasn't discounted for retailers, so they had to buy them in bulk and sell them at cost. Otherwise, you had to order them from mail-order ads in Byte Magazine.

 

Also, USCD Pascal couldn't link in any libraries -- everything that was required had to be included in the project. But TP let you link in libraries, which was one thing that made it run so frigging fast compared to UCSD Pascal.

 

I wasn't into Pascal at the time, so I didn't pay further attention to it until Delphi was introduced.

 

But I do recall visiting a friend who had bought the first issue of TurboC and we spent many hours playing with it, totally blown away at how fast it compiled on a floppy-only system; and playing with the built-in Debugger, which seemed AMAZING to me at the time. I waited until TurboC++ was released and THEN became a big Borland fan, because I think it was the first actual C++ "compiler" rather than "pre-processor" that was ever released. And the other options were 5x more expensive and much slower.

Edited February 25, 2021 by David Schwartz

[Bill Meyer 337]

40 minutes ago, David Schwartz said:

This is a nice article, but it it makes it sound like USCD Pascal and TurboPascal were related and evolved together. And of all the stuff he mentions, they're all academic curiosities now. UCSD Pascal disappeared after TP was introduced, and TP evolved into Delphi. I don't think anybody ever sold Modula or Oberon compilers commercially (although that would have been really nice).

 

As I recall, UCSD Pascal was released about 18 months before I'd heard of TurboPascal, and there was a huge package of stuff included in it. I believe it was free.

It was a long time ago, but let me offer a few recollections. 

I got UCSD Pascal (for CP/M) at a disk copying fest held at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, CA. Fairly certain it was 1978.

There was also Sorcim Pascal/M which was 1980-81, I think, and Pascal-MT+ from the same time. Microsoft also released an ISO Pascal which had no I/O, since ISO defined none.

TP 1.0 (for CP/M) was 1983, and flyers were sent out with cartoon art of "Frank Borland". Looked like a prospector, as I recall. I still have my manual from that. When I called to ask about it, Philippe was answering the phone from his office above the Jaguar repair shop in Scotts Valley. TP 1 came out just after a scandal about JRT Pascal, which had been offered for $29.95, I think, but was apparently quite buggy.

Some of the UK Borland team went off on their own when Borland elected not to market Modula-2. And how many here realize that Quattro Pro was written in Modula-2? But there were, in fact, versions of Modula-2 published by Borland, and I used to have one that ran on my LittleBoard Z80.

The commercial Modula-2 was under the name Topspeed. And they also offered Topspeed C++.  See this page: http://www.edm2.com/index.php/TopSpeed_Modula-2   Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modula-2

[David Champion 48]

1 hour ago, David Schwartz said:

I don't think anybody ever sold Modula or Oberon compilers commercially (although that would have been really nice).

Logitech licensed a quality Modula 2 compiler before they abandoned it in favour of devices such as mice.

Also, there was a fabulous Modula 2 compiler from TopSpeed

 

Both of which I used in comercial products I sold at the time.

 

TopSpeed Modula 2 was subsumed into Clarion, now a SoftVelocity 4GL product and used to be an optional language in the tool as at version 9.

 

Edited February 26, 2021 by David Champion

[timfrost 78]

I am another UCSD Pascal user from about the same time, on my first microcomputer, a North Star Horizon (the model with the wooden case). I still have the CP/M and USCD Pascal disks, manuals, and 'User Manual and Report'; and the computer, but with no VDU to see if it still works.  The first software tools I published were for various microcomputer-supported languages (including PL/1) before Lifeboat Associates persuaded me that C was the future. So I gave up Pascal and missed out on TP,  only going back to writing in Pascal when Delphi 1 arrived

[Bill Meyer 337]

11 minutes ago, timfrost said:

The first software tools I published were for various microcomputer-supported languages (including PL/1) before Lifeboat Associates persuaded me that C was the future.

I had the opportunity to play a bit with Whitesmith's C on CP/M, and that persuaded me it would not be my future. I am not sure now how many floppies were involved, but I do remember that compiling hello world -- when it didn't crash -- took about 4 minutes.

BDS C was fare more usable, but gave a whole new meaning to quirky.

TP 1.0 on CP/M was a revelation. Purely amazing, and all in a 27K .com file.

[Alexander Elagin 143]

47 minutes ago, Bill Meyer said:

I had the opportunity to play a bit with Whitesmith's C on CP/M, and that persuaded me it would not be my future. I am not sure now how many floppies were involved, but I do remember that compiling hello world -- when it didn't crash -- took about 4 minutes.

I remember compiling a (then) large FoxPro program with a text windows interface on PC XT. It even would not link at all - the linker crashed after a half of an hour - unless I replaced the linker with another (probably Watcom but I do not remember the detail) which could finally produce a working executable in just 40 minutes of heavy work. Those were the days...

[limelect 48]

@FPiette It seems you quote my resume

[limelect 48]

@FPiette You reminded me of my Motorola days.

Some of my business was SDK with 6800. (later 68000).

I played with 8080 (2 power supplies) but never liked

Intel.

Later however 8085 and 8051 with c for weighing which is my business

up to today. http://www.limelect.com

Those were the days of the beginning of Microprocessors

and I am proud to be one of those days. (young will not understand).

Unfortunately, did not have the chance to use 4040 (before 8080).

Edited March 3, 2021 by limelect

[David Schwartz 426]

14 hours ago, limelect said:

Unfortunately, did not have the chance to use 4040 (before 8080).

Originally, Intel built a custom chip for a calculator company who decided not to use it. So Intel made some small modifications and released it as the 4004.

 

It got a lot of interest, but it only had a 4-bit data path. So not long after that, they released the 8008 with 8-bit data paths and registers. I was in 8th grade, I think, and saw something in Popular Electronics about this and wrote the company asking for more info. I got a reply from a guy in their Marketing Dept named William H. "Bill" Davidow.  He sent me a rather large package of stuff, including a printout of the source code for their "monitor" software, the thing that evolved into the "boot ROM" code. When you get into most routers today, the UI is still nearly the same. 🙂

 

(People have asked me why I don't get "Cisco certified" as if it would open up lots of job opportunities for me. I ask, "Why? I spent many years writing and adapting that same ugly software for lots of different equipment! Those routers look exactly the same as what I worked with in the early 1980s.")

 

Intel then released the 8080 and learned a very important lesson: The 8080 instruction set was different from the 8008, and so they naturally put out an assembler that was different. They charged an arm and a leg for their dev systems, and when people discovered they'd have to start all over rewriting their 8008 software to run on the 8080, including more dev systemss, they balked. So someone quickly rewrote the 8008 assembler to generate code for the 8080, and with minimal changes it could then be used to generate code for either one. This put the 8080 on the map.

 

A guy named Charlie Bass left Intel and founded a company named Zilog, who then came out with the Z80 chip. It was the 8080 with a dozen or so additional instructions. But they had their own assembler with a different syntax, and nobody wanted to rewrite their code.

 

Intel actually had the 8085 in the pipeline with almost the same bunch of additional instructions as the Z80, and they watched as the market refused to adopt the Z80's extended instructions. Shortly before its release, the afor-mentioned Bill Davidow -- who was now Intel's VP of Marketing -- decided the Z80 was not a threat, and when they released the 8085 it was only touted as being faster than the 8080 while consuming less power. And it had one additional instruction. However, the entire first generation of 8085 chips were all endowed with a full complement of extended instructions that were never officially documented. The next release did away with most of them.

 

When the 8086 came out, they had learned their lesson, and the assembler would accept all of the source code written for the 8008, 8080, and 8085 chips, with additional features added for the new 8086 instructions. Intel realized that to ensure you got your existing customers to adopt your newer technology, you had to make it as frictionless as possible to "upgrade". 

 

That ultimately extended to hardware as well. When they introduced the 80386, they published "reference designs" of the motherboards. But so many companies didn't want to go to the hassle of building their own that Intel eventually started outsourcing their reference designs to HW manufacturers. When the 80486 went into general release, they had a list of sources with motherboards IN-STOCK that their customers could buy to start working with right away.

 

I suspect it has a lot to do with why the latest Delphi compiler will STILL compile Delphi 1 code (and even TurboPascal code with minimal changes). 

 

Sad to say, there are still companies that haven't figured this out!

[limelect 48]

@David Schwartz This was the calculator company (Mathatronics) I was part

of it, as a head engineer as a young engineer, to develop a chip calculator.

https://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/a-math3.html

The machine you see in the picture was wired with transistors and

my function was to change it to a chip.

I was using all the companies at a time to develop the chip for us.

We installed the calculator in a building! for the people to use with 

the little box you can also see in the picture. 

P.S this is what it knew to do

https://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/a-mathpkb.html

All with wired transistors

Edited March 9, 2021 by limelect

[David Schwartz 426]

a "timesharing calculator"! LOL!

[A.M. Hoornweg 144]

On 2/25/2021 at 11:46 PM, David Schwartz said:

But TP let you link in libraries, which was one thing that made it run so frigging fast compared to UCSD Pascal.

Do you mean units? Units only came in Turbo Pascal 4 AFAIK.

 

 

[David Schwartz 426]

On 3/9/2021 at 4:57 AM, A.M. Hoornweg said:

Do you mean units? Units only came in Turbo Pascal 4 AFAIK.

 

Libs, not DCUs. I don't know what they were called, or even when they were introduced since I never used TP.

 

I jumped on-board when Turbo C++ was released.