The 1990 version of Photoshop was written in Pascal.

http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/adobe-photoshop-source-code/

I've read that first Apple OS was in pascal.  Also that first Autocad version was written also in Pascal, but it need to exchange floppy disks too many times for compiling.

It looks like Pascal had a bright beginning. What happened to you, my beloved Pascal? Sniff =-)

53. Why did Autodesk decide to write AutoCAD in C rather than Pascal?

Because when Greg Lutz went to see a demo of IBM Pascal at the computer store, he discovered that it took 5 disc swaps or so to compile each file. Computer Innovations C let you run with the compiler in the A drive and your source in the B drive without playing disc jockey.

https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_112.html

Note who owns that website.

Wonder if it was still a p-code compiler back then, as it was based on Microsoft Pascal, which was based on UCSD Pascal.

http://www.edm2.com/index.php/Microsoft_Pascal

Jeff.

On Thu, May 24, 2018 at 4:13 PM, Mark Morgan Lloyd <

Microsoft Pascal was NOT based on UCSD Pascal. At least I seriously doubt it. I used UCSD Pascal back in those days, in various forms (Apple ][ Pascal, HP Pascal , UCSD Pascal on Sage, UCSD Pascal on PC) as well looked into MS Pascal for a company I worked for,as it was a direct binary compiler. And it had enough quirks that UCSD Pascal programs that could work on all the various UCSD derived version would not even compile. Now that is about 35 years ago, so I don't recall any details anymore...

Ralf

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I agree. The major intersection of UCSD Pascal and MS was that they could frequently be seen on the same Apple II system... MS made a Z80 card that allowed you to run CP/M-80, and it was very common to boot into one or the other. The P-System was actually a fairly late arrival for the PC and typically had a custom filesystem, while MS Pascal was "just another language" under DOS etc.

I don't recall Microsoft having any Pascal compiler for CP/M, the first version that I am aware (3.x) was already on PC/MS-DOS.

What those Z80 cards had in common with being used by people running Apple (UCSD) Pascal was that they were compatible to Apple's "Language Card" (slot 0)
(http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/42325/Apple-II-language-Card/) which had a replacement boot ROM and an additional 16KB of RAM, to allow the whole 64KB address space of the 6502 to be used. The most common Pascal on (Apple II) CP/M was at first probably Digitial Research's Pascal MT+, which was then also released as a PC/MS-DOS version for x86 as Pascal MT+ 86. There was also JRT Pascal, bad that was pretty bad, but all of those faded into oblivion once the first version of Turbo Pascal was released on CP/M, before the one for PC/MS-DOS...

(http://www.z80.eu/pas-compiler.html)

And UCSD Pascal did not "arrive late for the PC", it was among the offerings from IBM right from the start, but just like CP/M-86, it was just priced WAAAAYYY above PC-DOS, so very few people were actually using it, unless they had already significant exposure to it on the Apple II or devices like Sage or Cromemco back in the days before the IBM-PC.

Ralf

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Ralf Quint wrote

Pascal on (Apple II) CP/M was at first probably Digitial Research's Pascal MT+, which was then also released as a PC/MS-DOS version for x86 as Pascal MT+ 86.

I used that a lot on CCP/M-86, and it was probably the best of DR's language offerings.

And UCSD Pascal did not "arrive late for the PC", it was among the offerings from IBM right from the start, but just like CP/M-86, it was just priced WAAAAYYY above PC-DOS, so very few people were actually using it,

It was /offered/, but that's not to say that mere mortals could get their hands on it.

Funny you mention Photoshop...

Around this time I was asked to submit a program to represent my school in a state media competition. My response was, sure, ok. I wasn't really that interested, so I just grabbed one of the programs that I had and made it more user friendly. The program I chose was a graphics program I had written (using MS QuickPascal) to create assets for a game I was building. There weren't any graphics programs that had the abilities I wanted or was able to use true color, so I just slapped together this program to do that. It was essentially a throw-away program as far as I was concerned (one of those side-programs you make to facilitate making another program). When I was asked to submit a program to represent my school, I took this throw-away program, made it more user-friendly (mainly added an auto-hiding menu bar instead of using key-combos, and made it prettier to look at), created an example picture (a picture of a dragon's head) and saved it to be included with the disk, and threw together a 1 page "user manual" (for one, I had to explain transparencies [what I called what we now call "layers"], and also instructions to load the example picture to show what could be made with it) and turned it in.
     The school submitted the disk late (the state competition had already picked a winner), but despite that, they still awarded me first place (because they had already picked another first place, my program and whatever the other person's program was were made tied for first). I got a cheesy little trophy which the school displayed until I graduated.      I just shrugged it off...
     ... until I got a visit from some people who wanted to buy my program from me. They explained that their company had plans for porting their graphics program (Photoshop, which I had not heard of until then) to PC and that in the process of looking to see what was out on the PC side of the world that they had come across my throw-away program that had won, and that some of its features they were interested in using, and, thus, they were interested in buying my program (basically, they wanted the features, and wanted to legally cover their ass). Sure, whatever. Signed a bunch of paperwork, got a nice check, gave them my source code, was told I can no longer sell it as-is (I wasn't selling it, so, I didn't care), and that was the end of it.

     Well, almost... When PhotoShop *finally* did get released for PC (I think, 1993 ??? ), I found a copy, and I was curious why it seemed sluggish compared to the Apple version used in the computer labs, so I looked at its code with a disassembler (Eric Isaacson's D386; I love his A386 assembler, BTW) and noticed it did some pretty inefficient things and some pointless loops (as far as I was concerned, it looked, to me, like they were intentionally making it run slower on PCs). This kind of pissed me off (I didn't like the idea of being indirectly involved on the Mac side of the whole PC vs Mac speed thing that was going on at the time), so, I have refused to use Photoshop ever since then. Instead, I use PaintShop Pro. The PC vs Mac speed war has been dead for decades, but I can be stubborn (I still refuse to use PhotoShop).

     BTW, MS QuickPascal... I loved it back in the day. I still have my original copy, and most of the source code I had written. Occasionally I will actually go back to a program I wrote in the '90s in QuickPascal to see how I did something there (it has become a bit of a reference set for me for how to solve certain problems when programming now). Sometimes I'll even cut-and-paste some of my old QP code into my new FPC code, and there often isn't too much effort needed to update it. FPC is kind of good like that (the main thing that has to be updated is usually things like direct memory access or port access... Can't really do that in Windows, so that's a Windows issue, *not* a FPC issue).

-- Y

It all depended on how deep your pockets of a "mere mortal" would have been. CP/M-86 was around $250, while PC-DOS was something like $50 on a new IBM-PC back then. UCSD Pascal (from IBM, via Softech, which had a license from UC SD) was something like $495. But that also included the Fortran 77 compiler...

Ralf

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