More than 30 years ago, Ken Bowles and Mark Overgaard started what became, the UCSD Pascal. I had a copy of it on my Apple II before Philippe Kahn gave me a Turbo Pascal v1 floppy disk at Fall Comdex Las Vegas 1983. For some of you who don’t know - UCSD Pascal was the first PC (Apple II) Pascal compiler that generated p-code (that was interpreted) and the programs could run on lots of computers in the mid-1970(s). This was long before Java or .Net byte code by at least two decades.
UCSD Pascal, Microsoft Pascal, and Digital Research MT-Pascal were the standards during the early years of Apple, CP/M, and DOS (mid 70s to 1983). That all changed when Borland released Turbo Pascal. Turbo Pascal became the de-facto industry standard when version 1.0 shipped in the fall of 1983.
You can find the UCSD Pascal web site and a history article (as well as other information) on the following web sites. Streaming video of the presentations and Powerpoint slide shows are also available.
Due to other committments, I was unable to attend the reunion day. So, I sent a congratulatory email to Ken Bowles via UCSD. Ken replied back via email:
- “Thanks for your kind words (as forwarded to me by Kelly Briggs). Borland may be interested to know that I’ve been using Borland’s DELPHI development system (almost since it came out in early 90’s) for a variety of personal projects leading to programs running under MicroSoft Windows. All of my current personal website building tools, and display programs prepared for forthcoming exhibit at the San Diego Natural History Museum, are currently compiled and revised using Delphi-7. Pretty obvious, since the original Pascal language in that environment bears a strong resemblence to UCSD Pascal!! Cheers … Ken Bowles. FYI: See http://www.kenbowles.net/. Especially the section on San Diego Wildflowers. Vast bulk of the HTML is generated with those Delphi programs, using editors also written in Delphi … klb”
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