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History of Apple's Pascal Poster

Posted by pudge on from the raskin-v-jobs-re-poster dept.

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."

12 of 48 comments (clear)

  1. Great story! by Isbiten · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Though I wonder how you managed to get in touch with Jef Raskin :)

    And what a suprise that Steve was too stubborn to accept it in a way he couldn't understand, Interesting idea also, having a poster of the language on the wall.

    --
    I fought the corporate America, and the corporate America bought the law.
  2. Re:Wow, Jobs seems like an ass again by daviddennis · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Unfortunately, the drive to Accomplish Great Things makes many people tough to work with. You either accept the Great Things His Way, or you leave.

    If you consider that there are plenty of people who are lousy to work with who don't Accomplish Great Things, I'm inclined to cut Steve Jobs a little slack - because nobody can say that he doesn't Accomplish Great Things.

    Even if the changes to this poster aren't one of them.

    D

  3. THINK poster by Trillan · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Does anyone know the story behind Apple's THINK (not think different) poster?

    This poster just has the word THINK in six colors, and a copyright notice (which I forget) in black-on-block at the bottom.

    1. Re:THINK poster by lwagner · · Score: 4, Interesting

      >Does anyone know the story behind Apple's THINK (not think different) poster?

      >This poster just has the word THINK in six colors, and a
      >copyright notice (which I forget) in black-on-block at the bottom

      I have this poster, as well. My uncle printed the THINK posters for Apple.

      Its origin comes from IBM at the time, whose slogan was "THINK". IBM printed this phrase on internal posters and whatnot. IBM at that time was the Evil Empire. For those who have never seen it... Apple, in a sort of parody style (e.g., the 'Roasted Bunnymen' Intel campaign, created a poster that said nothing more than "THINK". The colors of "THINK" were in the 'Apple rainbow' thus encouraging people to think the Apple way.

      It just might be the precursor to the "Think Different" campaign. Certainly the same idea was used.

      I have another Apple internal poster that says, in a very stylized text... "Pascal Spoken Here". 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".

    2. Re:THINK poster by transient · · Score: 2, Interesting
      IBM printed this phrase on internal posters and whatnot.

      A friend of mine's mother worked for IBM back then. One day, after ferreting around in the attic, this friend presented to me a small notepad with the word "THINK" on the cover. An old-school ThinkPad!

      Can anyone confirm that this is where the name of their laptop lineup comes from?

      --

      irb(main):001:0>
    3. Re:THINK poster by transient · · Score: 3, Interesting
      iirc Apple built a *lot* of software with Pascal.

      Yeah, nearly the entire OS! Until Carbon was created, you still had to use Pascal strings in all system calls for backwards compatibility. (Pascal strings have their length in the first byte and aren't null-terminated.) This led to four million private implementations of p2c and vice-versa, as well as a new meta-character:

      "\pHello World!"

      '\p' is a Pascal string-length byte. Weird.

      To make matters worse, C and Pascal have different function calling conventions. I may have this backwards (or just wrong) but Pascal put its parameters in registers while C used the stack. If you were writing a callback for a system routine, you had to declare it thusly:

      pascal void my_callback();

      Callbacks were made even more fun when Apple switched processor architectures. But I'll leave that for another day.

      --

      irb(main):001:0>
    4. Re:THINK poster by Trillan · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Actually, Pascal and C shared a single calling convention on the PowerPC architecture.

      On the PowerPC, the calling convention uses registers. Sorta. If you want to understand it, Google it... it's quite complicated. :)

      On 68k, the calling conventions for Pascal and C are different. There's a lot more to it, but some of the highlights:

      C 680x0

      • Caller pushes parameters right to left
      • Variable numbers of paramters are allowed
      • The caller handles stack cleanup (necessary, sicne the number of paramters it pushed is not known to the called function)
      • The called function puts returns in a register for simple types, or pushes them onto the stack

      Pascal 680x0

      • Caller pushes parameters left to right
      • Only a fixed number of paramters are allowed
      • The called function handles stack cleanup
      • The caller pushes space for the return result
  4. Why, why, why I invented the syntax poster! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ... of course you did, Jef

  5. Re:Thank Niklaus for a simple language by Teddy+Beartuzzi · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Page 230 of the third edition.

    Damn, you know you're old when you've got that book sitting on your bookshelf.

  6. There Is Still Hope by Markus+Registrada · · Score: 4, Interesting

    That Pascal was so pervasive, so thoroughly entrenched, taught in universities, implemented everywhere, and yet has washed away so nearly completely gives me hope. Java is in the same position today, is even more pigheadedly designed, and suffers the additional handicap of being proprietary and having no public conformance standard. I'm confident nobody will be using Java, either, ten years from now.

  7. Re:If the world need any more proof... by WillAdams · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Funny, Pascal was also the language used for the back-end of the Web dialect in which Donald E. Knuth wrote the Literate Program TeX (and METAFONT).

    If you don't think TeX is used in production, look around you --- it's used in database publishing world-wide (railroad timetables in Germany, a phone directory in India, lots of directories here in the US). (Oh yeah, the macro format texinfo is the default documentation format for a certain ``GNU'' project).

    That's pretty cool, no? (And DEK provides rewards for finding errors in his programs and books --- want $327.68? find a bug in TeX. Won't be easy though).

    It's also not like Pascal stood still --- it was succeeded by Modula, and then Oberon (and it's interesting to note the language got both simpler and more expressive as time went by).

    William

    --
    Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
  8. I had one of these posters. by sakusha · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Oh man, I'd kill to have one of these Pascal posters. I worked at a company writing Apple Pascal software, I had one hanging over my desk. It saved many hours leafing through Wirth's Pascal book for the syntax diagrams. Our coding work was heavily based on these Wirth's Pascal reference book and his "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs" as well as a few extra algorithms from Knuth. Everything was designed with Nassi-Schneiderman flow charts which were easy to code using the Pascal syntax charts.