Apple III & Profile

From: D. Peschel <dpeschel_at_u.washington.edu>
Date: Wed Aug 12 19:35:36 1998

> > Pascal (for the ][, anyway) consists of four sides: 0, 1, 2, and 3.
> > Sides 0 and 1 are two sides of the same disk; ditto for sides 2 and 3.
>
> Are they? I've got UCSD Pascal (and Fortran, for that matter) for the
> Apple ][, on Apple-labeled disks, and it came on 4 single-sided disks
> Apple0, Apple1, Apple2, Apple 3. I used to use it on a 4-drive machine,
> with Apple 1,2,3 and my program disk in the drives.

Well, I think that's how it worked, but the last time I used the actual disks
was several years ago. We may have used different versions.

Of course, emulators don't care if something's on the front or back of a disk,
and I use an emulator now.

> It's not 'really' Apple software. It's the UCSD P-system configured to
> run on an Apple ][. I've got a very similar system on my Sirius, and I
> believe it was also available for the IBM PC, PDP11, Sage, etc.
>
> That's why it doesn't really behave like a normal Apple program.

Yes, but Apple as much as UCSD helped with the conversion and wrote system-
specific libraries (none of which are documented in the generic UCSD docs I
have access to). And you have to admit that Apple could have made a more
flexible program. (I never managed to configure it for 80 columns, though the
manual described how.)

> Of course (it's been a long time since I promoted my favourite classic,
> right :-)), p-code begat q-code, which was very similar with graphics
> instructions (draw a line was a pseudomachine instruction!), etc. It ran
> on the PERQ. But the difference between the UCSD p-system OS and the PERQ
> OS (POS) was quite amazing - POS had a proper filesystem (a directory
> tree, a very nice way of storing pointers to file blocks, etc), a proper
> command line, a sort-of pop-up menu interface, etc, etc, etc. A very nice
> OS, running on some nice hardware. Quite a toy in 1979...

I *really* have to see a Perq sometime.

And I'm still rather pissed at the reaction I got from the people at Bletchley
Park... they DO have Perqs, but hearing "All the machines we want switched on
are switched on" eliminated any hopes of seeing them the day I visited. :(

-- Derek
Received on Wed Aug 12 1998 - 19:35:36 BST

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