3 ms·

Small machines eh? How about a Casio PB-2000C, in all its pocketable 910 kHz glory, up to 64k RAM shared between heap, stack, code and RAM filesystem. 192 x 32

Small machines eh? How about a Casio PB-2000C, in all its pocketable 910 kHz glory, up to 64k RAM shared between heap, stack, code and RAM filesystem. 192 x 32 LCD and a piezo buzzer. Serial and parallel ports available and a FDD. It also has a ROM card slot. And a card was developed, the only third-party ROM for this platform, by one Hans Larsson in Sweden, in the late 1980s. A 64k ROM with: - a mostly TP 5.5 compatible Pascal compiler, crt and friends - inline assembly - units, loadable libraries and all - debugger - full-screen editor, global search and replace, etc. - visual file manager - CLI with redirection and rudimentary shell scripting - variables, conditionals, arguments While the hardware platform is somewhat available and there is a very good emulator, due to "issues", the DL-Pascal ROM is not at this time publicly available and only a chosen few have access to it. Luckily there is a preservation effort underway.

RodgerTheGreat 2mo ago
Sounds fascinating. Is there anywhere we can read more about this preservation effort? Does the PB-2000C have an active user community today?
- wowczarek 2mo ago
  Nothing public yet, it's an odd case, there is no contact with the author, but he apparently expressed to someone that he doesn't want the ROM shared. It all borders on the "five monkeys experiment" by now. There is a community and a very devoted one, yes, but it's a very small and dispersed one as well, a lot happens over email. There is a group of collectors who mostly hoard the devices and ROM cards and keep them under glass and like these things to keep value, and then there's the more engineering types like me, who actively tinker and actually use the things. At least the manual thankfully "leaked" - just take a look at this behemoth: https://archive.org/details/dl-pascal-manual-ocr https://archive.org/details/dl-pascal-manual-ocr This is all on a pocket 8-bit - calling the platform a "programmable calculator" is downright offensive! ;) I wrote an (unfinished as of yet) IP stack for it in DL-Pascal, I have working UDP and a DNS resolver but no TCP yet: https://github.com/wowczarek/pbnet https://github.com/wowczarek/pbnet
pjmlp 2mo ago
Interesting, given the prominence of Casio calculators in Portugal to this day. However it was always BASIC in the models we had access to.

RodgerTheGreat 2mo ago

Sounds fascinating. Is there anywhere we can read more about this preservation effort? Does the PB-2000C have an active user community today?

wowczarek 2mo ago
Nothing public yet, it's an odd case, there is no contact with the author, but he apparently expressed to someone that he doesn't want the ROM shared. It all borders on the "five monkeys experiment" by now. There is a community and a very devoted one, yes, but it's a very small and dispersed one as well, a lot happens over email. There is a group of collectors who mostly hoard the devices and ROM cards and keep them under glass and like these things to keep value, and then there's the more engineering types like me, who actively tinker and actually use the things. At least the manual thankfully "leaked" - just take a look at this behemoth: https://archive.org/details/dl-pascal-manual-ocr https://archive.org/details/dl-pascal-manual-ocr This is all on a pocket 8-bit - calling the platform a "programmable calculator" is downright offensive! ;) I wrote an (unfinished as of yet) IP stack for it in DL-Pascal, I have working UDP and a DNS resolver but no TCP yet: https://github.com/wowczarek/pbnet https://github.com/wowczarek/pbnet

pjmlp 2mo ago

Interesting, given the prominence of Casio calculators in Portugal to this day. However it was always BASIC in the models we had access to.