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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."
Twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy photographs with circles
and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each
one was to be used as evidence against us in code review?
Uhh, I meant, err, a Beowulf cluster of them? Yeah, that's it. Sorry 'bout that other thing back there.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
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.
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.
...I think you can see the template for Donkey Kong here. Same pallette, same abacus-like jungle jim structure.
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
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.
... of course you did, Jef
Damn, you know you're old when you've got that book sitting on your bookshelf.
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.
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
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.
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
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.