Pascal Micro Engines

From: Hans Franke <franke_at_sbs.de>
Date: Wed Aug 26 14:24:19 1998

>> Now *that's* historic! Western Digitals first (and last) CPU effort, the
>> first HLL ever implemented as an instruction set on a chip (afaik, anyway),
>> rare as hen's teeth (I'll bet it's scarcity is on the order of the Apple I),
>> not to mention that it was a *very* early 16-bit system that was actually
>> available to mere mortals.

> I thought the DEC LSI11 (PDP11/03) used a variety of this chip with different
> microcode roms.

Shure, bur the PMS (*G*) utilizes the p-code engine as native
Code - at one time the UCSD p-System was a kind of a ruling
cross platform and cross language standard. The 'p' of p-System
was 'pseudo' not 'Pascal' as most people belive - they had
compilers for Pascal, Fortran, Cobol and Basic - all using
the same p-code engine to run ans all using the same 'OS'.

So to get the system on a new nmachine you just had to write
some low level parts of drivers, and, if the new system had a
different microprocessor, a new p-code interpreter - whoops,
and everything was running.

Cross platform development was an easy thing - write one
application and let it run on PETs, Tandys, CPM/systems,
of coure on APPLE ][s and even on IBM-PCs - oh, did someone
say Java ? *grins*.

Gruss
H.

--
Ich denke, also bin ich, also gut
HRK
Received on Wed Aug 26 1998 - 14:24:19 BST

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