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Programming Businesses Apple IT Technology

History of Apple's Pascal Poster 48

Posted by pudge from the raskin-v-jobs-re-poster dept.
Lucas Wagner writes "Circa 1979, a strange poster was over nearly every programmer at Apple Computer. The "Syntax Poster" adorned offices, cubes, and even dealers. It was created by Jef Raskin and Steve Jobs. It was half art, half code. My uncle was a printer at the time and gave me one of them, thankfully, because they don't exist anymore. In researching the poster's origins, Raskin told me its history. I found it to be so interesting that, with his permission, I thought it would be a good article for fans of Apple trivia."
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History of Apple's Pascal Poster More

History of Apple's Pascal Poster

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  • Twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy photographs with circles
    and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each
    one was to be used as evidence against us in code review?

    Uhh, I meant, err, a Beowulf cluster of them? Yeah, that's it. Sorry 'bout that other thing back there.

  • Great story! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Isbiten ( 597220 ) <isbiten@gmail. c o m> on Saturday June 05, 2004 @02:43PM (#9345288) Homepage
    Though I wonder how you managed to get in touch with Jef Raskin :)

    And what a suprise that Steve was too stubborn to accept it in a way he couldn't understand, Interesting idea also, having a poster of the language on the wall.

    • Re:Great story! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by 0racle ( 667029 )
      A lot of people are like that, and in this case its not entirely stubbornness. Jobs is a very single minded person, so its not all that surprising that when information that he already knows is presented in a manner different then how he thinks, it seems either wrong or difficult to comprehend. For example:

      Fry: "DOOP? What's that?"
      Prof: "Its like the United Nations from your time."
      Fry: "Uh?"
      Hermes: "Or the Federation from your Star Trek program"
      Fry: "OH!"

      Exactly the same information presented in a very di
      • > Jobs is a very single minded person, so its not all that
        > surprising that when information that he already knows is
        > presented in a manner different then how he thinks, it seems
        > either wrong or difficult to comprehend.

        Benefit of the doubt:

        Jobs is also a consummate marketer. If this poster was given out to customers are resellers, then oftentimes technical "correctness" makes way for marketing savvy. Sometimes we've had to argue with our R&D department about how we've changed a diagram

  • Thank Niklaus for a simple languate (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Flexagon ( 740643 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @03:53PM (#9345672)

    From the referenced page: The amount of work and planning to do such a thorough charting of the syntax must have been large.

    Actually, my old copy of Wilson and Addyman's "A Practical Introduction to Pascal" has (a standard version of) this chart in Appendix I. Mine's the second edition, but the first edition was published in 1978. I know I've seen earlier versions as well.

    One of the distinct advantages of Pascal was that its syntax was so straightforward that creating a "railroad normal form" chart like this was relatively simple. You could easily write a parser for the language from scratch as a term project, without parsing tools like lex/yacc.

    • The syntax diagrams depicted in the poster, without all the fancy coloring were part of Niklaus Wirth's original "PASCAL - User Manual and Report" (with Kathy Jensen), published by Springer-Verlag in 1974.
    • While I program in C++, Java, and C# for source code I offer for public consumption, I use Delphi Object Pascal for all of my private libraries. I started developing for the PC back when it came out, and while I took a course that used Pascal, I was mostly a FORTRAN programmer, and for the PC I had looked at everything (Forth, structured FORTRAN, Janus Ada, you name it), got sold on Turbo Pascal, and hadn't looked back. C for the PC was a couple year in the future, and when C was a poor fit to the PC what

  • At a glance... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Zhe Mappel ( 607548 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @03:55PM (#9345685)
    ...I think you can see the template for Donkey Kong here. Same pallette, same abacus-like jungle jim structure.

  • THINK poster (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Trillan ( 597339 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @05:12PM (#9346108) Homepage Journal

    Does anyone know the story behind Apple's THINK (not think different) poster?

    This poster just has the word THINK in six colors, and a copyright notice (which I forget) in black-on-block at the bottom.

    • Re:THINK poster (Score:5, Interesting)

      by lwagner ( 230491 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @05:57PM (#9346391)

      >Does anyone know the story behind Apple's THINK (not think different) poster?

      >This poster just has the word THINK in six colors, and a
      >copyright notice (which I forget) in black-on-block at the bottom

      I have this poster, as well. My uncle printed the THINK posters for Apple.

      Its origin comes from IBM at the time, whose slogan was "THINK". IBM printed this phrase on internal posters and whatnot. IBM at that time was the Evil Empire. For those who have never seen it... Apple, in a sort of parody style (e.g., the 'Roasted Bunnymen' Intel campaign, created a poster that said nothing more than "THINK". The colors of "THINK" were in the 'Apple rainbow' thus encouraging people to think the Apple way.

      It just might be the precursor to the "Think Different" campaign. Certainly the same idea was used.

      I have another Apple internal poster that says, in a very stylized text... "Pascal Spoken Here". This one puzzles me because it's so geeky and yet so tastefully done. It's like someone spending $100K to hire an artist, do preprint work, and print up a large poster just to say, "We Code in Perl".

      • Thanks. I'll tell my boss, who loves the poster but doesn't (I think) know that it was a shot at IBM. That will make him love it more... :)

        My high school had a Pascal Spoken Here poster in the early 90s. I bet they threw it out.

      • Re:THINK poster (Score:5, Insightful)

        by schmaltz ( 70977 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @11:32PM (#9348201)
        This one puzzles me because it's so geeky and yet so tastefully done. It's like someone spending $100K to hire an artist, do preprint work, and print up a large poster just to say, "We Code in Perl".

        iirc Apple built a *lot* of software with Pascal. The main alternatives were BASIC and 6502 / 68000 assembler, as C had not caught on in a critical mass sort of way (talking late 70s-mid 80s here.)

        Perhaps the equivalent today would be the profitless spending of $$$ to build websites [slashdot.org] declaring [osdn.org] your affection [linux.com] for a certain system [gnu.org] or language [perl.org].

        • Re:THINK poster (Score:4, Interesting)

          by transient ( 232842 ) on Sunday June 06, 2004 @04:29AM (#9349048)
          iirc Apple built a *lot* of software with Pascal.

          Yeah, nearly the entire OS! Until Carbon was created, you still had to use Pascal strings in all system calls for backwards compatibility. (Pascal strings have their length in the first byte and aren't null-terminated.) This led to four million private implementations of p2c and vice-versa, as well as a new meta-character:

          "\pHello World!"

          '\p' is a Pascal string-length byte. Weird.

          To make matters worse, C and Pascal have different function calling conventions. I may have this backwards (or just wrong) but Pascal put its parameters in registers while C used the stack. If you were writing a callback for a system routine, you had to declare it thusly:

          pascal void my_callback();

          Callbacks were made even more fun when Apple switched processor architectures. But I'll leave that for another day.

          • Re:THINK poster (Score:4, Interesting)

            by Trillan ( 597339 ) on Sunday June 06, 2004 @05:19AM (#9349170) Homepage Journal

            Actually, Pascal and C shared a single calling convention on the PowerPC architecture.

            On the PowerPC, the calling convention uses registers. Sorta. If you want to understand it, Google it... it's quite complicated. :)

            On 68k, the calling conventions for Pascal and C are different. There's a lot more to it, but some of the highlights:

            C 680x0

            • Caller pushes parameters right to left
            • Variable numbers of paramters are allowed
            • The caller handles stack cleanup (necessary, sicne the number of paramters it pushed is not known to the called function)
            • The called function puts returns in a register for simple types, or pushes them onto the stack

            Pascal 680x0

            • Caller pushes parameters left to right
            • Only a fixed number of paramters are allowed
            • The called function handles stack cleanup
            • The caller pushes space for the return result
            • At the risk of being modded Off-topic, I'd like to ask if you know whether the calling conventions for OS X are documented someplace? Have they changed from the old PowerPC conventions?

              • Yes, they've changed. Or at least they have if you use Mach-O. And they changed again in 10.1 or 10.2 when someone pointed out that Mach-O was actually way less efficient than CFM.

                I'm not sure about CFM. It's probably the same.

                This [apple.com] is probably what you want.

      • Re:THINK poster (Score:3, Interesting)

        by transient ( 232842 )
        IBM printed this phrase on internal posters and whatnot.

        A friend of mine's mother worked for IBM back then. One day, after ferreting around in the attic, this friend presented to me a small notepad with the word "THINK" on the cover. An old-school ThinkPad [ibm.com]!

        Can anyone confirm that this is where the name of their laptop lineup comes from?

        • Yes - early in IBM days - most engineers were "required" to carry around a notpad in their shirt pocket - called the ThinkPad. This is where the name for the laptop came from.
        • Correct, the ThinkPad name was derived from the old leather notepads with ``Think'' on them.

          The IBM ThinkPad was originally conceived as a pen slate system (but Go Corp. fell behind somewhat, so a clam shell laptop was released instead).

          There's a lot of interesting explanation of all this and a lot more in the book _ThinkPad: A Different Shade of Blue, Building a Successful IBM Brand_ by Deborah A. Dell and J. Gerry Purdy, Ph.D., ISBN 0-672-31756-7.

          William

    • Re:THINK poster (Score:3, Informative)

      by Fletch ( 6903 )
      Does anyone know the story behind Apple's THINK (not think different) poster?
      This is the first I've heard of an Apple THINK poster, but it's probably a play on the slogan/signs IBM had [ibm.com] around it's offices since ~1915.

  • Why, why, why I invented the syntax poster! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 05, 2004 @06:04PM (#9346429)
    ... of course you did [folklore.org], Jef

  • There Is Still Hope (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Markus Registrada ( 642224 ) on Saturday June 05, 2004 @08:50PM (#9347516)
    That Pascal was so pervasive, so thoroughly entrenched, taught in universities, implemented everywhere, and yet has washed away so nearly completely gives me hope. Java is in the same position today, is even more pigheadedly designed, and suffers the additional handicap of being proprietary and having no public conformance standard. I'm confident nobody will be using Java, either, ten years from now.
  • gee, what a surprise, Jobs picks style over substance. You have to admire his consistency anyway.

  • How abourt a re-creation (Score:3, Insightful)

    by JoeCommodore ( 567479 ) <larry@portcommodore.com> on Sunday June 06, 2004 @05:17PM (#9352497) Homepage
    Abnyone see this an an opportunity to re-create the poster so folks can put it on thier wall and it will make more sense? Sure looks like cool nerdware to me.

    Thought about Job's decision's - I think he saw the potential to turn someting utilitarian (but cool looking) into marketing, by putting fab colors and having a known artist's signature - he made the poster a techno-artwork that the elite would show off instead of geared for hard-working nerds who just wanted to write bug-free code.

  • I had one of these posters. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sakusha ( 441986 ) on Sunday June 06, 2004 @08:54PM (#9353506)
    Oh man, I'd kill to have one of these Pascal posters. I worked at a company writing Apple Pascal software, I had one hanging over my desk. It saved many hours leafing through Wirth's Pascal book for the syntax diagrams. Our coding work was heavily based on these Wirth's Pascal reference book and his "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs" as well as a few extra algorithms from Knuth. Everything was designed with Nassi-Schneiderman flow charts which were easy to code using the Pascal syntax charts.

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