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The UCSD P-system OS (from the 1970s) always had a single line menu bar across the top of the screen, whose entries might change when different applications ran
by jonjacky 8y ago
The UCSD P-system OS (from the 1970s) always had a single line menu bar across the top of the screen, whose entries might change when different applications ran. I have always suspected that was the inspiration for the Macintosh menu bar.
This slide deck has a brief history of UCSD Pascal and the P-system OS, with quite a few technical details:
http://pascal.hansotten.com/uploads/ucsd/reunion/Richard%20Kaufmann%20-%20What%20The%20Heck%20Was%20UCSD%20Pascal.pdf http://pascal.hansotten.com/uploads/ucsd/reunion/Richard%20K...
- agumonkey 8y agoVery nice slides. They do mention Apple ][ relationship, it's quite plausible they influence Apple dev teams.
- jdswain 8y agoBill Atkinson ported UCSD Pascal to the Apple ][, and he was one of the very core Mac developers. Apple Pascal was probably one of the very few software systems that spanned all of Apple's computers at the time. The Apple /// made heavy use of it and had the benefit of a lot more RAM. Then the Lisa Monitor used the same menus as earlier Apple Pascals. I think the Lisa Pascal was licensed from another company and wasn't a port of UCSD Pascal though. One of the first pieces of code for the Mac was a port of the Lisa Monitor, so those Pascal menus were probably the first menu bar on the Macintosh. The Macintosh Toolbox, while written mostly in assembly language had Pascal bindings and much of it was originally written in Pascal before being rewritten in assembly, QuickDraw was based on LisaGraf which was written in Pascal. https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Joining_Apple_Computer&showcomments=1 https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...