Long-time Slashdot reader mbessey (a Mac/iOS developer) writes:
As we’re coming up on the 50th anniversary of the first release of UCSD Pascal, I thought it would be interesting to poke around in it a bit, and work on some tools to bring this “portable operating system” back to life on modern hardware, in a modern language (Rust).
Wikipedia describes UCSD Pascal as “a version that ran on a custom operating system that could be ported to different platforms. A key platform was the Apple II, where it saw widespread use as Apple Pascal. This led to Pascal becoming the primary high-level language used for development in the Apple Lisa, and later, the Macintosh. Parts of the original Macintosh operating system were hand-translated into Motorola 68000 assembly language from the Pascal source code.”
mbessey is chronicling their new project in a series of blog posts which begins here:
The p-System was not the first portable byte-code interpreter and compiler system — that idea goes very far back, at least to the origins of the Pascal language itself. But it was arguably one of the most-successful early versions of the idea and served as an inspiration for future portable software systems (including Java’s bytecode, and Infocom’s Z-machine).
And they’ve already gotten UCSD Pascal running in an emulator and built some tools (in Rust) to transfer files to disk images. Now they’re working towards writing a p-machine emulator in Rust, which they can they port to “something other than the Mac. Ideally, something small â” like an Arduino or Raspberry Pi Pico.”
