it's alive (UCSD Pascal that is)
glenn.f...@gmail.com
BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front): I am running UCSD p-System IV.0 on the H8/H19 (long story to follow…):
And now the long story…:
Recall back in the late 70s/early 80s the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) had developed an operating system called the UCSD “p-System” (but more commonly called “UCSD Pascal” since it was primarily a Pascal environment). At the time it had some very innovative features integrating the edit, compile, run, debug steps through a menu-driven screen system. And Pascal was quite popular in computer science curricula at the time. Eventually UCSD licensed it for commercial development, and it had a modest following. Apple licensed it as Apple Pascal. I think the p-System deserves a place of honor in the history of computing since it was innovative for its time and since so many people learned through it. It is well worth preserving and demonstrating.
Heath marketed two versions. The first was based on UCSD p-System Rev. II and used the H17 disk format:
From catalog #853 (spring/summer 1981)
It was *not* cheap! And the speed and limited disk capacity of the H17 really made this a toy system. But it was a pretty cool toy I guess…
Later Heath updated to version IV (which was developed from the UCSD code by SofTech Microsystems (which I think was essentially a spinoff from the university?):
Christmas 1984:
This required an H89/Z90 and dual 96TPI disks! It was quite pricey at $495.
By this time the IBM PC was well established, and DOS was dominating the marketplace since it was cheap or even free with many machines. The p System slowly died.
But about 10 years ago when I was working on the disassembly and reconstruction of the Heath/Zenith PREP/PART routines for the Z67 I discovered that Heath/Zenith had put the hooks in there to support the p-System on the Z67. To my knowledge that never came to pass but ever since then I’ve had the itch to get a decent implementation running on the H8. I do have both Heath versions operable but due to disk limitations they are quite restrictive.
Recently I’ve been working with Les Bird testing out his Z80 ROMWBW board for the H8. ROMWBW is the brainchild of Wayne Warthen (who is now a subscriber to this list). It turns out Wayne also had an interest in the p-System and had implemented it on the ROMWBW including a whole custom BIOS! But his implementation was for the VT100 and wouldn’t work on a more typical H8/H19 setup.
Today I was able to do the customization needed to support the H19. It is up and running and really quite an enjoyable experience given the speed of the computer (16Mhz) and the disk space available on the Compact Flash drives. It’s actually a usable system.
Huge thanks to both Les and Wayne for opening the door to this capability.
Currently only runs on the ROMWBW but with the groundwork Wayne has laid we could probably port this to any of our other platforms. Put that somewhere on the “to do” list 😊.
I will make this version available through the SEBHC wiki. We also have established a discord channel for discussion on the ROMWBW work.
I think next I’ll dig out the old Eratosthenes Sieve article from Byte and see what kind of speed we get out of this…
- Glenn
Joseph Travis
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Glenn Roberts
On Oct 22, 2023, at 9:25 PM, Joseph Travis <jtravi...@gmail.com> wrote:
That's awesome Glenn! I hope to be able to play with this sometime. I worked at the Heathkit San Diego location (in La Mesa, CA) and remember UCSD students who would come into our store with their own disks to use our H8 and H89 demo computers. I never got into it back then as it seemed kinda cumbersome and difficult to learn (compared to CP/M). Of course when Turbo Pascal came out, any interest I had in UCSD P-System faded away.Joe
On Sun, Oct 22, 2023 at 9:15 PM <glenn.f...@gmail.com> wrote:
BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front): I am running UCSD p-System IV.0 on the H8/H19 (long story to follow…):
<image005.jpg>
And now the long story…:
Recall back in the late 70s/early 80s the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) had developed an operating system called the UCSD “p-System” (but more commonly called “UCSD Pascal” since it was primarily a Pascal environment). At the time it had some very innovative features integrating the edit, compile, run, debug steps through a menu-driven screen system. And Pascal was quite popular in computer science curricula at the time. Eventually UCSD licensed it for commercial development, and it had a modest following. Apple licensed it as Apple Pascal. I think the p-System deserves a place of honor in the history of computing since it was innovative for its time and since so many people learned through it. It is well worth preserving and demonstrating.
Heath marketed two versions. The first was based on UCSD p-System Rev. II and used the H17 disk format:
From catalog #853 (spring/summer 1981)
<image001.png>
It was *not* cheap! And the speed and limited disk capacity of the H17 really made this a toy system. But it was a pretty cool toy I guess…
Later Heath updated to version IV (which was developed from the UCSD code by SofTech Microsystems (which I think was essentially a spinoff from the university?):
Christmas 1984:
<image004.png>
This required an H89/Z90 and dual 96TPI disks! It was quite pricey at $495.
By this time the IBM PC was well established, and DOS was dominating the marketplace since it was cheap or even free with many machines. The p System slowly died.
But about 10 years ago when I was working on the disassembly and reconstruction of the Heath/Zenith PREP/PART routines for the Z67 I discovered that Heath/Zenith had put the hooks in there to support the p-System on the Z67. To my knowledge that never came to pass but ever since then I’ve had the itch to get a decent implementation running on the H8. I do have both Heath versions operable but due to disk limitations they are quite restrictive.
Recently I’ve been working with Les Bird testing out his Z80 ROMWBW board for the H8. ROMWBW is the brainchild of Wayne Warthen (who is now a subscriber to this list). It turns out Wayne also had an interest in the p-System and had implemented it on the ROMWBW including a whole custom BIOS! But his implementation was for the VT100 and wouldn’t work on a more typical H8/H19 setup.
Today I was able to do the customization needed to support the H19. It is up and running and really quite an enjoyable experience given the speed of the computer (16Mhz) and the disk space available on the Compact Flash drives. It’s actually a usable system.
Huge thanks to both Les and Wayne for opening the door to this capability.
Currently only runs on the ROMWBW but with the groundwork Wayne has laid we could probably port this to any of our other platforms. Put that somewhere on the “to do” list 😊.
I will make this version available through the SEBHC wiki. We also have established a discord channel for discussion on the ROMWBW work.
I think next I’ll dig out the old Eratosthenes Sieve article from Byte and see what kind of speed we get out of this…
- Glenn
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Dave McGuire
> BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front): I am running UCSD p-System IV.0 on the
> H8/H19 (long story to follow…):
system) at LSSM a couple of weeks ago.
pSystem is a really nice system in many ways. We're planning on
getting it running on many more platforms at the museum this winter.
PDP-11, HP Series-80, IBM PC, etc.
-Dave
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Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
Glenn Roberts
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terak_8510/a
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Dave McGuire
Yes, we have three or four Teraks. None have been restored; I'm
planning to dig into one of them in the next month or two and get it
running unless someone beats me to it.
-Dave
Glenn Roberts
Sent from my iPad
> On Oct 22, 2023, at 10:09 PM, Dave McGuire <mcg...@neurotica.com> wrote:
>
>
Dave McGuire
They really are. I had an opportunity to work on (i.e. repair) two
of them when I was in high school, in NJ in the mid-1980s. The Voc-Tech
school in my school system had a room with about half a dozen of them,
and two of them died. The teacher over there asked my school's comp-sci
teacher if she knew of anyone who could repair them, so she put him in
touch with me, as she knew I had a PDP-11 at home and was into hardware.
So I rode my bike over there and got them running; cleaned and
realigned a drive in one and replaced a bridge rectifier in the other.
They paid me $150 for the repair, quite a lot for a poor kid in 11th
grade, and that clued in my grandmother (with whom I lived at the time)
that this might actually be a decent line of work for me. :)
I never saw another Terak until about ten years ago, when a few
nonfunctional machines and a pile of parts were given to me for the
(eventual) museum, which opened a couple of years after that. (This
past Tuesday, 10/17, was the eighth anniversary of the first public
opening of LSSM.)
I'm sure I can get one running. I'm really looking forward to it.
-Dave
norberto.collado koyado.com
I got my first PDP at age 25 as I was working with DEC...
Dave McGuire
11th grade, not 11 years old. I was 16. I got very lucky; I had an after-school job at a university (building circuit boards for a research project) and a professor there "arranged" to have his lab's just-decommissioned PDP-11/34a given to me.
You should've seen it. "Hey grandma, the university gave me a computer, can I bring it in?" "Oh sure.." then my best friend and I rolled the six-foot rack into the tiny apartment and her jaw dropped open!
I had to power it from outlets in three different rooms (to get to different circuit breakers) with long orange extension cords. My grandmother was patient, she said it kept me "off the streets and out of the bars". ;) The apartment had free electricity.
-Dave
norberto.collado koyado.com
norberto.collado koyado.com
Beautiful system! So, this is a custom system using Les Z80 ROMWBW board; correct?
It will be nice to run it on the original Heath Z80 design.
Norberto
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Glenn Roberts
On Oct 23, 2023, at 2:26 AM, norberto.collado koyado.com <norberto...@koyado.com> wrote:
Beautiful system! So, this is a custom system using Les Z80 ROMWBW board; correct?
It will be nice to run it on the original Heath Z80 design.
Norberto
From: se...@googlegroups.com <se...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of glenn.f...@gmail.com
Sent: Sunday, October 22, 2023 6:15 PM
To: se...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [sebhc] it's alive (UCSD Pascal that is)
BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front): I am running UCSD p-System IV.0 on the H8/H19 (long story to follow…):
<image002.jpg>
And now the long story…:
Recall back in the late 70s/early 80s the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) had developed an operating system called the UCSD “p-System” (but more commonly called “UCSD Pascal” since it was primarily a Pascal environment). At the time it had some very innovative features integrating the edit, compile, run, debug steps through a menu-driven screen system. And Pascal was quite popular in computer science curricula at the time. Eventually UCSD licensed it for commercial development, and it had a modest following. Apple licensed it as Apple Pascal. I think the p-System deserves a place of honor in the history of computing since it was innovative for its time and since so many people learned through it. It is well worth preserving and demonstrating.
Heath marketed two versions. The first was based on UCSD p-System Rev. II and used the H17 disk format:
From catalog #853 (spring/summer 1981)
<image003.png>
It was *not* cheap! And the speed and limited disk capacity of the H17 really made this a toy system. But it was a pretty cool toy I guess…
Later Heath updated to version IV (which was developed from the UCSD code by SofTech Microsystems (which I think was essentially a spinoff from the university?):
Christmas 1984:
<image004.png>
This required an H89/Z90 and dual 96TPI disks! It was quite pricey at $495.
By this time the IBM PC was well established, and DOS was dominating the marketplace since it was cheap or even free with many machines. The p System slowly died.
But about 10 years ago when I was working on the disassembly and reconstruction of the Heath/Zenith PREP/PART routines for the Z67 I discovered that Heath/Zenith had put the hooks in there to support the p-System on the Z67. To my knowledge that never came to pass but ever since then I’ve had the itch to get a decent implementation running on the H8. I do have both Heath versions operable but due to disk limitations they are quite restrictive.
Recently I’ve been working with Les Bird testing out his Z80 ROMWBW board for the H8. ROMWBW is the brainchild of Wayne Warthen (who is now a subscriber to this list). It turns out Wayne also had an interest in the p-System and had implemented it on the ROMWBW including a whole custom BIOS! But his implementation was for the VT100 and wouldn’t work on a more typical H8/H19 setup.
Today I was able to do the customization needed to support the H19. It is up and running and really quite an enjoyable experience given the speed of the computer (16Mhz) and the disk space available on the Compact Flash drives. It’s actually a usable system.
Huge thanks to both Les and Wayne for opening the door to this capability.
Currently only runs on the ROMWBW but with the groundwork Wayne has laid we could probably port this to any of our other platforms. Put that somewhere on the “to do” list 😊.
I will make this version available through the SEBHC wiki. We also have established a discord channel for discussion on the ROMWBW work.
I think next I’ll dig out the old Eratosthenes Sieve article from Byte and see what kind of speed we get out of this…
- Glenn
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glenn.f...@gmail.com
So I did run the Byte Sieve. Came up with 56 seconds.
The original article is here
56 is relatively competitive with the machines of the times back then (MS COBOL took over 5,000!), though PL/1-80 ran it in 14 seconds (that was on a Z80 machine I presume at 2Mhz).
Still overall the cycle of edit, run debug was quite usable on the P system. If the compile fails you just type ‘E’ (edit) and it drops you into the editor at the exact line where the error occurred. Fix the bug, type ‘Q’ (quit), ‘U’ (update), ‘R’ (compile and run). Compile took only a few seconds. Pretty speedy.
The full screen editor is a little awkward compared to, say PIE, but once you learn it it’s quite usable. Fun system. I can see why it had its fans back in the day…
- Glenn
Sent: Sunday, October 22, 2023 9:15 PM
To: se...@googlegroups.com
Dave McGuire
Yes I was very lucky back then. The PDP-11/34a initially came with
two RL01 drives. A year or so later I added an RK07. (that's when it
needed three power cables..)
The system was running RSX-11M, but I later moved to RSTS/E.
-Dave
norberto.collado koyado.com
Sent: Monday, October 23, 2023 6:29:18 AM
To: se...@googlegroups.com <se...@googlegroups.com>
norberto.collado koyado.com
This custom Z80 ROMWBW board can run without the H8 front panel; correct? On the new H8 backplane you can divide onto two, so that you can have two CPU’s running at the same time.
From: se...@googlegroups.com <se...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Glenn Roberts <glenn.f...@gmail.com>
Date: Monday, October 23, 2023 at 2:08 AM
To: se...@googlegroups.com <se...@googlegroups.com>
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sebhc/656169EE-C936-4089-BC8C-F1C2B3EED7DC%40gmail.com.