🚀 go-pugleaf

I'd like to report on the event mentioned in the subject line.
Please do not expect a profound analysis. I will give a collection
of personal impressions and observations.
1. Turbo C
It exists and they do already SELL it. There was a special offer for visitors
of the fair: The compiler at DM 150. Assembler and debugger exist but are
not yet released. We played around with the compiler for some time. Really
neat| Fast, easy to handle. Acceptable editor. Just real Turbo C.
We found a minor bug in the include library (a declaration missing in
<time.h>), so they have chances to further improve the product. A great
compiler im my opinion. We compiled dhrystone V1.1 (V1 would not give
any meaningful results for unknown reasons) and got 1706 dhr/sec.
I think I'll buy this package unless gcc proves to be comparable.
2. The Transputer (former ABAQ)
The box they showed there was obviously a prototype. No one would buy it
in that shape. I mean its look. The thing seemed to work, although as
it appeared, it isn't terribly stable. Dhrystones 3170 (V1.1) and 2270 (V1).
The shell is very csh-like, I found no obvious differences. The diff
doesn't do anything reasonable. We tried it on two files which happened
to be identical and it wrote kilobytes of differences to the screen.
Piping the same command through more made the system break down and weep.
It had to be booted a couple of times while we played with it.
Invoking cc with only a source file and no options as arguments wrote
assembler code to stdout. But one can do it in two steps, first call
cc -S source.s source.c
and then
asm -o text /lib/cstart.o source.s
Oh, and by the way, occasionally the source file had size zero after the
invocation of cc.
They had MicroEMACS 3.8 running. X-Windows do not work yet, that's why shell-
windows had a fixed size (a quarter of the screen, a little too small for
80 character display).
There seems to be no job control (according to the guy at the booth, he was
nice and helpful but I would hesitate to call him an expert).
cp'ing files did not work reliably, we found that the probability of
successful cp'ing was bigger after cd'ing to the target directory.
A FORTRAN compiler was said to exist, but it was not shown. Same for Pascal.
3. Beckemeyer products.
Gerd Sender presented Micro C-Shell, bdt's multitasking OS, and related
products. I Germany these are not so popular as in the States (as far as I can
tell from the net), and I saw them for the first time. I felt at home immedi-
ately, you know, I'm used to a UNIX environment. I had the impression, though,
that it isn't extremely fast, but that may have been the slow disk's fault.
They told me they could not sell us any campus licenses due to conditions
imposed by Beckemeyer Development Tools. (Is that true, David?)
4. Misc.
A Company named Pluennecke presented PROSPERO compilers. Knowing their FORTRAN
and Pascal, I would have liked to see their C. But the guy there was so un-
friendly and arrogant that I would not talk with him any longer.
We played with Laser C (833 dhr/sec V1.1), Lattice was also shown. I missed
MWC, don't know why it's so rare in Germany. I believe they are still selling
version 2.x here.
68030 box: Not shown, no comments.
5. Operating systems.
They showed an ST with TOS 1.4. Unfortunately I had no time to play with it.
Otherwise a total miss. I found people selling OS-9, but they would not show
it because they were demonstrating their network software.
I greatly missed Idris. I have never seen anybody in Germany to sell it.
I don't know why. This market is just as important for the ST as the States,
maybe even more. Maybe it'll be Minix then...
6. General impression
Nice coloured pictures, few hard facts. Games. A little disappointing.
When I talked about this to somebody at one of the booths, he said
to me: "What do you expect of a dying computer?"
7. Date
Sep. 2-4
That's it, friends
Yours
Michael
  Michael Eibl, Inst. f. Theor. Phys., Universitaet zu Koeln
                Cologne, West Germany
ab084@dk0rrzk0.BitNet
.