UCSD P System (was: Why is it that ...

From: milneQDELETETHECAPITALSQ_at_speed.net <(milneQDELETETHECAPITALSQ_at_speed.net)>
Date: Tue Jun 18 05:27:23 2002

> > At 06:07 PM 11/29/00 -0800, you wrote:
> > >...
> > >And it really didn't make PC-DOS look good. I've put a screen shot
> > >of the UCSD P-system file manager prompt at:
> > >http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/~korpela/gif/filer.gif.

  This is NOT the UCSD p-System filer, it's one belonging to
  a derived version of it that Apple briefly used on the Apple II.
  To give you a little context, this was version II of the p-System
  (the Roman numerals denoted architecture versions).

  The one released by SofTech Microsystems, on the IBM and the Sage
  and many others, was version IV, and it was a major overhaul.
  (Status of segments regularised, almost no limit on the number of
  segments in a system, all units swappable, dynamic linking,
  instruction set even more compact than before, procedural
  parameters, conformant arrays, semaphores, processes, etc. etc.)

  Including using 80 columns on the screens! (Actually you could
  change that in SYSTEM.CONFIG if you needed to, as seems clearly
  to have been done with this example).

  The filer used full names in its menus when it had the screen
  width to do so. Which was most or all of the time after those
  very early screens, unless, as I say, you did something to
  SYSTEM.CONFIG .

  As for making DOS look good, it made it look dreadful.
  I still remember the pain of migrating to Turbo Pascal, which
  was the BEST that DOS had to offer. Tiny file names, NO file
  typing (file extensions are NOT file types), terribly slow
  floppies, file volumes WITHOUT NAMES (which continues to this day),
  every program needing all its code linked into it statically,
  hence several copies of the same code on the same floppy -- etc etc.
  (DOS's only advantages: more flexible number of entries in a
  directory, and borrowing a poor man's version of directory trees
  from UNIX. The p-System only allowed 77 entries in a directory
  -- that was from a time when the DEC PDP-11 was popular -- and
  had only 1 level of "subdirectory", which was an actual subvolume
  file, of fixed size. And DOS was to acquire networking, whereas
  work on the p-System seems to have suspended before that could
  happen.)

  Oh, and the p-System had powerful wildcards, including use for
  mass name changes. DOS's wildcards were always weaker, and buggy.

  And I really did like being able to compile on a 68000 machine
  and run the compiled code on an 8086. Much faster turnaround
  time. (I once did a project where we were supposed to use the
  then-Microsoft Pascal on XT's for compiling -- all in native code
  of course. We stayed in UCSD Pascal and compiled within the
  p-System because it was FASTER!)

> > >You may remember what those letters stand for, but I don't.
> > ...
> >
> > For those not wanting to chase the link, it says:
> >
> > Filer: G, S, N, L, R, C, T, D, Q [1.1]
> >
> > Don't you remember? This was the security mechanism.
> > You had to play a game of hangman and win before you
> > could run the compiler. The person above obviously doesn't
> > know the key to hangman is the vowels.

  I trust this misimpression is now corrected.

> Hmm.... my versions show the menu as something like
>
> G(et, S(ave, N(ew, L(dir, R(en, C(hng, T(rans, D(ate, Q(uit
>
> but there are more options on an 80-column screen.
>

   A. Milne
Received on Tue Jun 18 2002 - 05:27:23 BST

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