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Unfortunately, the CD is likely to be useless without the hardware to read it (hence the need to archive the entire machine.) As an example, I used to write software on a Terak 8510/a. Let's say that I archived 200 of the 8-inch floppies into high-school year books. Right now, a mere 30 years later, they would be completely useless, regardless of their ability to retain data. So unless the yearbooks all have PCs taped to the back cover, I don't see the distributed model gaining you anything.

Does anyone remember USCD UCSD P-SYSTEM?

Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language

ANSI isn't old-school. TTY art is old-school.

I didn't do a count, but there were a ton of folks for both the reunion talks and for the dinner event afterwards.

Highlights:

* Ken Bowles' talk about his five careers. Before his UCSD days, he was one of the builders of the Jicamarca Radar Observatory.
* Bud Tribble (VP, Apple) talking about how UCSD Pascal (AKA Apple Pascal) influenced the Lisa and the Macintosh. Apple was extremely generous and presented KB with a shiny new iMac.
* Mark Overgaard discussing one of the truly terrible product names of the era. UCSD P-System, indeed!
* The chancellor of UCSD (Mary Anne Fox), the dean of engineering (Frieder Seible), and the chair of the CS department (Ramomohan Paturi) praising Bowles and the project.
* Seeing almost all of my old project buddies make it back to campus. We also looked back at the social aspects of the project, including pictures that seemed to involve a lot more hair. (A combination of biology and the 70's. Shudder.)
* A demonstration of a running UCSD Pascal system on my XP notebook. (Thanks John Fouts!)

There are a lot of artifacts from the day, including video (to be broadcast on UCSD-TV and available via webcast), as well as powerpoint. When I know the URLs for all this stuff, I'll post them here. John tells me he would also like to have them on his UCSD Pascal museum (http://www.threedee.com/jcm/psystem/index.html).

Cheers,

Richard Kaufmann (author of the UCSD Pascal screen editor)

The machines running the P-system in firmware never caught on. They were expensive and proprietary - the ones I know about had a very limited production run before they were discontinued. They ran a special version of the P-system. Most people at UCSD (myself included) ran the P-system on the University's Terak microcomputers, a very early pre-IBM PC beast with 8 inch floppies.

Check out http://www.threedee.com/jcm/ for more history of the Terak computer and the p-System. A pure bitmap display with 320 x 240 mono graphics, pan/scroll, a software-driven speaker and sound, all designed as a desktop personal computer, wow! It's right there in the history books next to Xerox PARC machines and the PERQ.

In November 1981, an Terak 8510/a with a PDP-11/03 CPU, 56K of RAM and one floppy drive was $8,935. And extra floppy drive was $2,570. You could even upgrade to color graphics at 640 x 480 by eight colors for $10,550. A ten meg hard drive was $7,985.

One of my functional Teraks was invited to take part in the 1970s History exhibit at SIGGRAPH 98, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the ACM SIGGRAPH conference, the annual gathering of the computer graphics industry.

The p-System was one of the operating system alternatives for the original IBM PC, apart from MS-DOS and CP/M-86. If you can find them, the disk images for that p-System will still run in a command window under Windows, if you preload ANSI.SYS.

Another reference to the reunion is http://www.alumni.ucsd.edu/magazine/vol1no3/featur es/pascal.htm .

This Terak page won the "Geek Site Of The Day" Award on October 16, 1996.

- John

Mac Pascal, Lightspeed C! I thought I was the only living person who climbed that learning curve. Problem was; it turned in to a learning cliff that I then fell off. I was good for nothing but assembler and BLISS for years until Pascal came along. This means we are due for a birthday party for the original MS-Basic pretty soon.
But didnt Pascal lead people to think of P-code which foreshadowed Java bytecode? a link off the article's link seems to agree with my memory...so i better not read it too carefully;)

and I certainly didn't use pascal just for academics. When I execavated the basement hole for my house, on an ostensibly unbuildable scrap of bedrock-studded land, a pascal contour mapping program that I wrote detected the one spot where the bedrock would be flat and need no blasting...back hoe guy was amazed an amateur could show him right where to dig.

Pascal was more than a programming language, it was a multi-platform operating system.

>>and P-code came before Java (in what, 1983?).

Earlier than that. I was writing p-System code in mid-83 and it definitely wasn't version 1. According to this article, the date of version 1.3 of the p-System is August 77.

He's referring to UCSD Pascal, I think, which was a fairly successful cross-platform interpreted language. More info here.

People mention the UCSD P-System when they recount the predecessors of portable, interpreted virtual machines like Java. In theory, a P-System executable program was portable between machines with different processors because the program was not expressed in machine-dependent assembly code but instead the "p-code" machine language of a virtual computer. Java uses the same approach to gain platform independence.

The Professor Jeff S Rohl not mentioned in most of the Pascal articles (possibly because he's more famous for Modula2 etc) lives about 20km south of here.

I don't think the mono developers care if they're compatible or not. For them, it's an emerging technology with the posiblity to change computing for the better.

It's not an emerging technology and it won't change computing. There's nothing new in .net which isn't already present in Java, very little that wasn't already present in the UCSD p-system in 1973, and not a lot which wasn't already present in BCPLin 1967

The timeline goes like this:

1. BCPL, 1967: Single source language (BCPL) compiles to CINTCODE, which runs on a virtual machine with standard libraries; virtual machine is ported to multiple architectures, allowing the same binary to run on all architectures.
2. P-System, 1973: Several source languages (including Pascal, Fortran and others) compile to 'P-Code', which runs on a virtual machine with standard libraries; virtual machine is ported to multiple architectures, allowing the same binary to run on all architectures.
3. Java, 1991: Several hundred source languages (including Ada, BASIC, C++, Cobol, Forth, Fortran, JavaScript, LISP, Modula, Oberon, Occam, Pascal, Prolog, Python, Ruby, Scheme, Smalltalk, TCL, and anything which GCC compiles) compile to JVM code, which runs on a virtual machine with standard libraries and network transparency; virtual machine is ported to multiple architectures, allowing the same binary to run on all architectures.
4. .NET, 2000: Innovation! Celebration! Microsoft do more of the same!

This is because Microsoft introduced the concept of the CLR, or common language runtime.

To cite just one example, the author seems never to have heard of the venerable UCSD P-SYSTEM

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