Pascal for small machines

About

These pages are written by Hans Otten 

Me and Pascal

I started to study physics in 1969. Fascinated by technology, electronics in particular. See my Philips Bouwdozen pages how that started!
The university was Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, the home of the Amsterdam Compiler Kit, Prof van het Riet, Andrew Tanenbaum, Minix.
But in 1969 computers were practical unknown machines there! Nice electronics courses, analog and digital, but no cpu's.

Several years further in the study I was writing a paper and needed to do a lot of calculations. Boring, repetitive and time consuming. Slide rules were my main aid.
And then I found in a lab a PDP-8, with papertape reader and punch! Punch the program, the data, load the operating system, load the Fortran compiler, load the data and discover the bugs....
Fun, i crunched that way a lot of data and the paper was a success. I looked around for a second subject to graduate, and hey! a computer science department had appeared! So following lectures, working on compiler construction, Andrew Tanenbaum and Pascal, my future was becoming clear: computers are the biggest toys around!

Things went fast then: microprocessors appeared, Z80 in the lab, a KIM-1 at home, programming in assembler.
I had the privilige to attend a meeting in Utrecht (the Netherlands) on The Crisis in Software development where Tony Hoare, Niklaus Wirth and Edsgar Dijkstra talked about structured programming. Fascinating!

Pascal became the programming language I preferred to work in. I used Apple Pascal. I worked on a HP1000 with HP Pascal. Via the KIM-1 user club a Pascal compiler written by Mark Rustad, based on the P2 compiler with a 6502 interpreter was given to me.
Versions of Pascal for the PDP-11 and the excellent VAX/VMS Pascal (John Reagan was then working for DEC (and is now still at HP).

Turbo Pascal on CP/M, the clone MSX-DOS and then on MS-DOS was fun, my favorite language on systems becoming more powerfull every year. It survied into Delphi and the Free Pascal Compiler, ther altter still used by me in DOS style.

Nowadays I do not program that much. On PC's its less fun for me, GUI's, object oriented, bloatware etc. I want to work with the small machines again, be in contact with the hardware again. Back to 6502 hardware! But in a structured way, so Pascal as development environment.

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