🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov21.055139.18590@foretune.co.jp> trebor@foretune.co.jp (Robert J Woodhead) writes:
>uesu03@giac1.oscs.montana.edu (Lou Glassy) writes:
>>Is any work going on in this area?  Or does performance pay
>>more than portability?
>
>The UCSD p-System had many advantages for its time.  Recall, back in
>those dark ages, machines were slow, memory was tight (64k was huge)
>and hard discs were non-existant.  Even floppies rarely had more than
>150k on them.
>
>So packing a decent OS that could run reasonable programs into such
>environments was tough.  The p-System attacked this problem in several
>ways:
>
>1) p-Code instructions were highly optimized both for space and ease
>of interpretation, which meant that the interpreters were small, and
>the p-Code programs themselves were smaller than equivalent machine
>code programs; so much so that usually OS+Interpreter+p-Code program
>was smaller than the native machine code program alone!
>
>2) That smaller size really helped when you consider the size and
>speed of the storage devices.
>
>3) p-Code was easy to compile for, which meant that the Pascal compiler
>was small (ie: it could actually run on a 64k machine!)
>
>4) It was portable, which meant that it was easy to support all the
>gazillion different machines out there.
>
>For it's time, the UCSD p-System was a great achievement, but like
>all things, its time has passed.  I myself used the Apple Pascal
>version to write Wizardry (14,000+ lines, originally done on a
>64k, 2-floppy machine; full compiles took an hour!).
>
>Wierd side story: When Wizardry was translated into Japanese, the
>Japanese company that did the work (and from whose premises I am
>writing this note) simply wrote p-System interpreters for all the
>target machines, and we made minor modifications to the Wizardry
>program to handle Japanese characters and syntax (the final version
>let you choose at boot time if you wanted to play in English, Kana
>or Kanji).  After we were done, we back-converted their interpreter
>to run either standalone or under MS-DOS; I wrote Wizardry IV on a
>NEC9801 MS-DOS machine that, after a suitable command line incantation,
>promptly said "Welcome to Apple Pascal!"
>
>(And yeah, I bought an extra copy of Apple Pascal for the NEC, too!)


When I read "4)" I almost hit 'F' to say that Wizardry I on the Apple II
was a great example of the efficiency of UCSD Pascal. :-)

Luckily, I read further before I put my foot in my mouth.

Along with all my other computers, I still have an Apple IIe here, and I
boot up Wizardry every now and then and remember back to the days of
excitement.

Wizardry on the Apple is/was very responsive considering the speed of the
floppy media.  It should probably be considered as a significant stepping
stone in the evolution of computer games.

-- 

Rick Kelly	rmk@rmkhome.UUCP	unixland!rmkhome!rmk	rmk@frog.UUCP