🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <By54pz.9x2@wimsey.bc.ca>, sl@wimsey.bc.ca (Stuart Lynne) writes:
> I remember hearing about this in the early 80's. Rumour had it that they
> did cross development on larger systems (DEC 10's??).

  I don't have the full text of the parent articles available. However, it
looks like at least 2 threads here.

  First, yes, early Microsoft software was cross-assembled on a DECsystem.
At least Microsoft BASIC and Fortran (CP/M versions) were. I'm sure the
assembler (M-80) was. I'm not sure about the Cobol, or any of the "appli-
cation" stuff. They used a version of the DEC assembler and a custom macro
library. With a few (very few) changes, they could assemble either an 8080
version or an 8086 version from the same source file. This is probably due
to the original "gang of three" - Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Monty David-
off - who did the original BASIC-80 on the Harvard DECsystem while Bill was
in school.

  As far as the UCSD P-system, well, several things went wrong there. One
was that it wasn't supposed to be a "business" and some folks got very
upset when it grew to the size it did, being from a school and all that.
Second, Western Digital did a version of the WD-16 (the same chipset as is
used in the DEC LSI-11 and the Alpha Micro systems) which directly executed
UCSD P-system code. All of the other systems at the time had an emulator
which ran P-system code on the native hardware. Unfortunately, right after
Western Digital built the chipset (the "Pascal Microengine"), the UCSD folks
decided to rearrange the P-code into some incompatible format. This caused
at least one company that was trying to build machines based on the WD-16
to fold. Of course, there wasn't much market for obsoleted WD-16's at that
point. Everybody sort of crawled away from the wreckage saying that they'd
never do anything with UCSD again (except for UCSD, of course, who had the
ego to think that they still had a major market).

  As far as "P-code", I think the term was used by the original poster as
sort of a generic term for common code emulated on diverse hardware plat-
forms. I don't think anyone would actually use UCSD P-system code for such
products as Multiplan - it would make a lot more sense to develop a code
set suited for the particular application. Probably something like Forth
or STOIC, in this case.

	Terry Kennedy		Operations Manager, Academic Computing
	terry@spcvxa.bitnet	St. Peter's College, Jersey City, NJ USA
	terry@spcvxa.spc.edu	+1 201 915 9381