History of Apple's Pascal Poster 48
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."
But can you imagine... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:But can you imagine... (Score:4, Funny)
You can get anything you want at Apple's Restaraunt [fortunecity.com]
Just log right in, it's just to the left [apple.com]
Just a half a inch from the RDF [lowendmac.com]
You can get anything you want at Apple's Restaraunt [yahoo.com]
Re:But can you imagine... (Score:2)
Re:But can you imagine... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Wow, Jobs seems like an ass again (Score:5, Interesting)
If you consider that there are plenty of people who are lousy to work with who don't Accomplish Great Things, I'm inclined to cut Steve Jobs a little slack - because nobody can say that he doesn't Accomplish Great Things.
Even if the changes to this poster aren't one of them.
D
Re:Wow, Jobs seems like an ass again (Score:2)
Re:Wow, Jobs seems like an ass again (Score:3, Insightful)
Before Jobs, Apple was an all but failed company. It hadn't managed to put together a successor to Classic MacOS, despite enormous effort. Its products were uninspired beige boxes.
After Jobs, Apple became far more innovative. It started making interesting products again. A lot of the same people were doing the same jobs (bad pun, sorry) under Amelio, but their brilliance was unleashed under Jobs.
Clearly Steve Jobs' management made a huge difference in the company and its perception in the
Great story! (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
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
Re:Great story! (Score:2)
> 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)
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.
Re:Thank Niklaus for a simple languate (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Thank Niklaus for a simple language (Score:3, Interesting)
Damn, you know you're old when you've got that book sitting on your bookshelf.
Re:Thank Niklaus for a simple language (Score:1)
Re:Thank Niklaus for a simple languate (Score:2)
Pascal syntax and railroad tracks (Score:2)
At a glance... (Score:5, Funny)
THINK poster (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
>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".
Re:THINK poster (Score:2)
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)
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)
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:
'\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:
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)
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
Pascal 680x0
Related question (Score:2)
Re:Related question (Score:2)
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)
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?
Re:THINK poster (Score:1)
Origin of IBM ThinkPad name (was Re:THINK poster) (Score:2)
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)
Why, why, why I invented the syntax poster! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why, why, why I invented the syntax poster! (Score:1)
There Is Still Hope (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:There Is Still Hope (Score:2)
C is already passé, outside of restricted domains like Unix kernels and GNOME. Unfortunately, C++ inherited "signed char".
Re:There Is Still Hope (Score:2)
Yipes (Score:1)
Re:If the world need any more proof... (Score:4, Interesting)
If you don't think TeX is used in production, look around you --- it's used in database publishing world-wide (railroad timetables in Germany, a phone directory in India, lots of directories here in the US). (Oh yeah, the macro format texinfo is the default documentation format for a certain ``GNU'' project).
That's pretty cool, no? (And DEK provides rewards for finding errors in his programs and books --- want $327.68? find a bug in TeX. Won't be easy though).
It's also not like Pascal stood still --- it was succeeded by Modula, and then Oberon (and it's interesting to note the language got both simpler and more expressive as time went by).
William
surprise surprise (Score:1)
How abourt a re-creation (Score:3, Insightful)
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)