* Posts by philw2

2 publicly visible posts • joined 20 May 2012

This'll make you feel old: Uni compsci favourite Pascal hits the big five-oh this year

philw2

pascal was fine

It's manifest nonsense to say that "Pascal was useless", unless you're reading the textbook and forgetting that practical implementations were modified for engineering use.

"Whitesmiths Pascal" was particularly common. It was a bodge, running on VMS and cross-compiling for 68000 targets via a couple of intermediate stages one of which was C. It wouldn't have been my personal choice, and I didn't much "like" Whitesmiths, but there was a lot to like in Pascal, and a lot to learn for people with open minds.

Pre-Pet Commodore micro up for grabs on eBay

philw2

Re: I actually used one for a University assignment

Looks a lot like the ones they had in Durham. I think they were as pictured here.

They were used to teach machine code to 1st year undergraduates in 1979/80 at least. No big deal for those of us who'd already programmed HP calculators. At the time they seemed kind of quaint, although they were presumably quite new. It was just that things were moving pretty quickly.

They also had Acorn Atom machines about, which were much more interesting than these things at the time.