UCSD PASCAL (P-system) P-code

From: Mike Ford <mikeford_at_socal.rr.com>
Date: Thu Nov 30 11:22:06 2000

>> original Pascal being done at UCSD, and IMHO by a LOT of student work, they
>> set up a business with the "new" product.
>
>hahaha surprised eh..... not me this is typical in Italy, extremely
>common. During one of my course the teacher told us that it was MANDATORY
>to participate at the development a Z8000 cross assembler in order to

Very often a LOT of learning occurs when you trip over a crack in the
system. Chances are good I would have remained a serious happy physics
major, except for one lab report. During my 2nd year we had a lab on
ballistics, that included shooting a 22 rifle into a pendelum. Many many
measurements, followed by grinding the numbers through a couple stages of
equations, then plotting the results a couple different ways. Hours of
work, and having just learned Fortran, I was punching cards for the IBM
1130 before even thinking of poking with a calculator. It did take me
awhile, but the end result was the whole report printed out fairly nicely,
with graphs etc.

When I handed it in a couple days late I expected to get into some trouble,
but the Graduate student in charge of the lab accepted it like stone
tablets. "How did you do this?, did you type all this?" Every student in
lab had unique data, so to correct each paper he was spending like 3 hours
doing all the calculations, and only had about 3 done out of 60+ students.
My program reduced that to about 5 minutes of data entry, and maybe another
10 minutes of comparing the final reports.

In return for giving him the program, which continued to be used for some
time after I left, I got his account ID and password to use the ....
HP3000. By a week later I stopped seeing sunlight for a quarter or so,
spending my time in dark rooms with tektronics vector display terminals.
Once hooked, there was no going back.
Received on Thu Nov 30 2000 - 11:22:06 GMT