5 ms·
I'm reminded of a really great interview with Bill Atkinson where he describes (among many other things) how he initially brought Pascal to Apple and the Apple
by thought_alarm 9y ago
I'm reminded of a really great interview with Bill Atkinson where he describes (among many other things) how he initially brought Pascal to Apple and the Apple II.
https://youtu.be/6tUWoy1tJkE?t=45m https://youtu.be/6tUWoy1tJkE?t=45m
The Pascal bits are from 45:00 to about 50:00.
...
My manager at the time said, no, we don't want to do this [Pascal],
people are happy with what they got. I overrode him and went to
Jobs, and Jobs said "Well, I'm not convinced. I think our users are
happy with BASIC and assembly language. But you seem passionate
about it. I'll give you one week to prove me otherwise."
I was on an airplane within two hours down to UC San Diego and I
started porting right away.
...
The other thing that happened then is I had to plug in the disk
routines, and their system was pretty big and that little 13-sector
floppy disk didn't have a lot of capacity. Well, Woz had just come up
with a different way of encoding the data on the disk so that we could
get more data for the same disk size, and we needed the 16-sector disk
routines. And so Woz came down, and I was there... I had never bothered
to get a motel because I slept on the bench when I wasn't working. This
is in the computer science lab at UC San Diego. I was busy, I didn't
have time to go sleep.
But Woz came down, and I got to interact with him and it was really fun
because he was working on installing these 16-sector disk driver
routines, and he'd go 'type type type type type' -- and he didn't type
in assembly language and have it assembled. No, he'd type in 6502
machine code. Hex. -- He'd type in hex, and then, you know, watching
him type and he'd go 'type type type' -- pause -- 'type type type type',
and when he finished I asked him what was the pause? And he said
"forward branch, seven instructions, I had to compute the offset before
I continued". So, he didn't back-patch the offset, he actually looked
at what he was going to be typing, knew how many bytes it would take...
he was brilliant.
- juliangamble 9y agoThis is one of the great quotes in the Walter Isaacson Steve Jobs book: Next he created for the Apple II a version of Pascal, a high-level programming language. Jobs had resisted, thinking that BASIC was all the Apple II needed, but he told Atkinson, "Since you're so passionate about it, I'll give you six days to prove me wrong." He did, and Jobs respected him ever after. https://books.google.com.au/books?id=cf_2PBPP-rEC&pg=PT143&lpg=PT143&dq=since+you%27re+so+passionate+about+it+i%27ll+give+you+six+days+to+prove+me+wrong&source=bl&ots=pPGjkRYz7j&sig=kTkSRb7bPLncBAWKuLpmxrGZIXw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwis3dyt65vVAhXLybwKHRodCQgQ6AEIKzAB#v=onepage&q=since%20you're%20so%20passionate%20about%20it%20i'll%20give%20you%20six%20days%20to%20prove%20me%20wrong&f=false https://books.google.com.au/books?id=cf_2PBPP-rEC&pg=PT143&l...
- tambourine_man 9y agoDidn't know about Triangulation, thank you. When will someone build HN for Audio/Video.
- Flow 9y agoNot to take away any of Woz's brilliantness, but coding the 6502 in hex was something many of us did every day in the 80's. He's right that branches are a tad tricky, but the number of instructions you usually use are few enough to remember the hex codes(and number of cycles) for along with the various hardware registers(CIAS, VIC-II and SID mostly for me) and bits within those registers.
- sedatk 9y agoThat's true. Although I used pen and paper to calculate offsets, I could write simple routines right away in machine code when I was 12 years old.
- walshemj 9y agoInteresting at my first job I did a little bit on USCD Pascal on apple.
- slantyyz 9y agoWhile I did a little bit of COBOL and Fortran (on digital minicomputers) in high school, USCD Pascal in grade 12 was the thing that really got me off BASIC on my personal computer (at that time, an Apple ][gs). IIRC, the line my high school computer science teacher used about USCD Pascal without paying at the time (around 1988) was that it was out of copyright or something, but now that I think of it, I'm not so sure that was a legit reason.
- orionblastar 9y agoI learned USCD Pascal in high school 1985 on Apple II systems. Thank you for your contributions. Wizardy 1 was in USCD Pascal I heard.