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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."

17 of 48 comments (clear)

  1. But can you imagine... by BandwidthHog · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?
    1. Re:But can you imagine... by babbage · · Score: 3, Funny

      Oh, you can get anything you want at Apple's Restaraunt
      You can get anything you want at Apple's Restaraunt
      Just log right in, it's just to the left
      Just a half a inch from the RDF
      You can get anything you want at Apple's Restaraunt

      --
      DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
    2. Re:But can you imagine... by gmhowell · · Score: 4, Funny

      Lisa and the Apple ///. The computers for those of us on the Group W bench.

      --
      Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
  2. 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.
  3. Thank Niklaus for a simple languate by Flexagon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Thank Niklaus for a simple languate by Rouxfus · · Score: 3, Informative

      The syntax diagrams depicted in the poster, without all the fancy coloring were part of Niklaus Wirth's original "PASCAL - User Manual and Report" (with Kathy Jensen), published by Springer-Verlag in 1974.

  4. At a glance... by Zhe+Mappel · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...I think you can see the template for Donkey Kong here. Same pallette, same abacus-like jungle jim structure.

  5. 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

  6. 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 schmaltz · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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 ... where's Siggy?
    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
  7. Why, why, why I invented the syntax poster! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ... of course you did, Jef

  8. 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.

  9. 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.
  10. 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.