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History of Apple's Pascal Poster
Lucas Wagner writes "Circa 1979, a strange poster was over nearly every programmer at Apple Computer. The "Syntax Poster" adorned offices, cubes, and even dealers. It was created by Jef Raskin and Steve Jobs. It was half art, half code. My uncle was a printer at the time and gave me one of them, thankfully, because they don't exist anymore.
In researching the poster's origins, Raskin told me its history. I found it to be so interesting that, with his permission, I thought it would be a good article for fans of Apple trivia."
From the referenced page: The amount of work and planning to do such a thorough charting of the syntax must have been large.
Actually, my old copy of Wilson and Addyman's "A Practical Introduction to Pascal" has (a standard version of) this chart in Appendix I. Mine's the second edition, but the first edition was published in 1978. I know I've seen earlier versions as well.
One of the distinct advantages of Pascal was that its syntax was so straightforward that creating a "railroad normal form" chart like this was relatively simple. You could easily write a parser for the language from scratch as a term project, without parsing tools like lex/yacc.
This one puzzles me because it's so geeky and yet so tastefully done. It's like someone spending $100K to hire an artist, do preprint work, and print up a large poster just to say, "We Code in Perl".
iirc Apple built a *lot* of software with Pascal. The main alternatives were BASIC and 6502 / 68000 assembler, as C had not caught on in a critical mass sort of way (talking late 70s-mid 80s here.)
Perhaps the equivalent today would be the profitless spending of $$$ to build websites declaring your affection for a certain system or language.
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
Yes and no.
... and, most likely, is why there are so few truly great products.
Before Jobs, Apple was an all but failed company. It hadn't managed to put together a successor to Classic MacOS, despite enormous effort. Its products were uninspired beige boxes.
After Jobs, Apple became far more innovative. It started making interesting products again. A lot of the same people were doing the same jobs (bad pun, sorry) under Amelio, but their brilliance was unleashed under Jobs.
Clearly Steve Jobs' management made a huge difference in the company and its perception in the world. And it was his meticulousness that made MacOS X a superbly designed and crafted product.
I'm not saying it's easy to work for someone like Steve. But this kind of obsessiveness is how great products get made
D
A lot of people are like that, and in this case its not entirely stubbornness. Jobs is a very single minded person, so its not all that surprising that when information that he already knows is presented in a manner different then how he thinks, it seems either wrong or difficult to comprehend. For example:
Fry: "DOOP? What's that?"
Prof: "Its like the United Nations from your time."
Fry: "Uh?"
Hermes: "Or the Federation from your Star Trek program"
Fry: "OH!"
Exactly the same information presented in a very different way. Now Fry is an idiot, but you get the idea.
One good thing that does come out of the article is that it appears the Jobs likes colour, something that really is lacking in a lot of job sites when your working with computers, but it can make the people working there feel a little better. It needs more blue though.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Thought about Job's decision's - I think he saw the potential to turn someting utilitarian (but cool looking) into marketing, by putting fab colors and having a known artist's signature - he made the poster a techno-artwork that the elite would show off instead of geared for hard-working nerds who just wanted to write bug-free code.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield