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The UCSD p-System, Apple Pascal, and a dream of cross-platform compatibility
The UCSD p-System, Apple Pascal, and a dream of cross-platform compatibility never quite realized I’ve been thinking about the UCSD P-System a lot lately, and I thought I’d write about …
Way back in 1974-1978, computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego campus developed a new portable operating system, compiler, and tools to run on both the PDP-11 minicomputers and the increasingly-common microcomputers. The secret to its wide portability was that the system sat “on top of” a very small kernel of machine-dependent code, which implemented a “virtual machine” called the “p-machine”, a kind of imaginary CPU specifically designed to be a good target for a Pascal Compiler. 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).
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