The same year (1983) that Apple released the Lisa computer I discovered the Pascal programming language. In 1980 I learned to program using BASIC on an Apple II Plus computer. I had taken an introductory class in programming while working as a medical intern and became ‘hooked’. Following my internship I worked as lead designer and programmer on a medical research project to develop an Apple II based endoscopy data management system – more to come on that later.
In 1979 Apple Computer released version 1.0 of Apple Pascal (which was based on UCSD Pascal) to run on the new Apple II Plus computer. As discussed in a prior post, Pascal was to be of enormous importance to the company’s future. Apple Pascal was more than a programming language. It was a complete software development environment (compiler, linker, assembler and editor) embedded within a unique menu-driven operating system.
Version 1.0 of Apple Pascal cost $495 (approximately $2100 in today’s dollars) and came in a box containing a 16K hardware ‘Language Card’ (to increase the Apple II Plus’ memory from 48K to 64K), several reference manuals and five 5.25″ system disks. The first release of Apple Pascal was an expensive professional programmer’s tool that I could not afford at the time.
When I finally purchased Apple Pascal in early 1983 it was at version 1.2 and cost considerably less. I installed it on my Franklin Ace 1000 (an Apple II Plus clone) with 64K of memory, an 80-column display card, 12 inch monochrome amber display monitor, two 5.25″ floppy disk drives and a noisy dot-matrix printer.
The Pascal language was transformative, facilitating structured programming, that produced modular re-usable code that was easier to read, understand and maintain. Pascal became the default language for teaching college-level computer science in the 1980s and influenced the design of many of the programming languages that followed.
So, 40 years later I thought that it would be fun to recreate the Apple Pascal programming environment in which I learned structured programming. To do so I would need an Apple II computer, disk drives, a display monitor, Pascal system disks and manuals. Where to begin? See these posts:
Acquiring an Apple II computer and Installing Apple II Pascal
Henry Lowe 