Retro Computing Enthusiast Tries Running Turbo Pascal On a 40-Year-Old Apple II Clone (youtube.com) 26
Four months ago long-time Slashdot reader Shayde tried restoring a 1986 DEC PDP-11 minicomputer.
But now he's gone even further back in time. Shayde writes: In 1984, Apple II's were at the top of their game in the 8 bit market. A company in New Jersey decided to get in on the action and built an exact clone of the Apple. The Franklin Ace was chip and ROM compatible with the Apple II, and that led to it's downfall.
In this video we resurrect and old Franklin Ace and not only boot ProDOS, but also get the Z80 coprocessor up and running, and relive what coding in Turbo Pascal in the 80s was like.
Why Turbo Pascal? "Some of my earliest professional programming was done in this environment," Shayde says in the video, "and I was itching to play with it again."
But now he's gone even further back in time. Shayde writes: In 1984, Apple II's were at the top of their game in the 8 bit market. A company in New Jersey decided to get in on the action and built an exact clone of the Apple. The Franklin Ace was chip and ROM compatible with the Apple II, and that led to it's downfall.
In this video we resurrect and old Franklin Ace and not only boot ProDOS, but also get the Z80 coprocessor up and running, and relive what coding in Turbo Pascal in the 80s was like.
Why Turbo Pascal? "Some of my earliest professional programming was done in this environment," Shayde says in the video, "and I was itching to play with it again."
I remember Turbo Pascal fondly (Score:5, Informative)
At my high school they had Apple IIs that ran UCSD Pascal (and had a special card in them enabling this, maybe?), and a single IBM PC (5150 I think but maybe an XT) that could run Turbo Pascal. Turbo Pascal compiled so much faster than USCD Pascal that it seemed almost like magic. Plus the computer had the amazing IBM buckling-spring keyboard. I remember writing a Hammurabi clone on that system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamurabi_(video_game)).
Re:I remember Turbo Pascal fondly (Score:4, Interesting)
On the Apple ][ you needed the 16k RAM expansion card to run UCSD Pascal: that card replaced the upper 16k of the 64k RAM map so that the Pascal system could store its virtual machine (!) and replace the original ROM with the operating system.
It was a fascinating environment, and an incredibly usable one, given its enormous limitations (150k per disk, and just a few kb of usable RAM).
I learnt both programming AND english on that; the documentation was of the highest level.
Re: (Score:3)
I had a TransWarp card (3.3Mhz 65C02 + 256 KB of fast ram) in my II+ clone, with some simple hex patching, UCSD Pascal thought it was a //E and used 128KB of the ram and some more hacking gave me a ram disk on the rest of the 256k that the TransWarp card had.
Also had a MS Z80 card and eventually moved to Turbo Pascal, and yes, it was fast, both compiling, and running as it compiled into Z80 object code instead of P-Code. Wasn't hard to call 6502 code from the Z80 as well.
Re: (Score:2)
"Apple IIs that ran UCSD Pascal (and had a special card in them enabling this, maybe?)"
It was called a 'language card' but it was just an extra 16K of RAM .
The manuals included a copy of Jensen and Wirth
You could also use the card to load Apple's original integer BASIC
TP was awesome!! Followed by Turbo C (Score:5, Interesting)
I had an Apple IIc .. which was a pretty cool little box. Not much bigger than a modern laptop .. a built in Froppy drived. 128k. external 9 inch monochrome monitor. I could throw everything and a 1200b modem into a milk crate and carry it any where. Most of the time nothing used the extra 64K so you could set it up as ram disk and have 2nd virtual floppy that was really fast. ADDITIONALLY you could pop off the keyboard, plug in a z80 with 64k daughter board so it was a pass through connection to it could use the keyboard, floppy etc .. and have a functioning z80. I had Turbo Pascal and Turbo C .. thats how I got through college. When the undergrad PDP-11/70 was WAY over taxed and running so slow you typed a command in and waited 2-3 min, I could just work locally get everything going and at 2am when things quieted down phone in ... to my vt52 terminal emulation and use kermit to transfer my code over .. do a quick compile to make sure there weren't any differences between PDP-11 pascal and turbo, fix if needed and go to bed by 2:30!! Good times. I believe Both Turbo pascal and Turbo C were 39.99 apiece.
Re: (Score:2)
Pascal turned up in lots of interesting places. You mention IBM, the IP stack for their mainframe OS at the time was written in Pascal.
Re: (Score:2)
Turbo Pascal compiled so much faster than USCD Pascal that it seemed almost like magic.
It isn't fair to compare a 1 MHz 6502 to a 4.77 MHz 8088...
so what? (Score:3, Interesting)
I hate to be a downer, but I am among many other people who have working Apple ][ series computers, and we regularly run things such as Turbo Pascal. When I was young, I used Apple Pascal, but then later got the Z80 "CP/M" card and was able to use Turbo Pascal.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If you're not interested in the story why would anybody else be?
Yeah, that's just being a downer for no reason.
I too ran Turbo Pascal on a //e with a Z/80 card and enjoy seeing other people rediscovering computing history.
Turbo Pascal... (Score:2)
Turbo Pascal had a version that was menu driven. A friend's older brother was using that version in college in the late 80s. I always liked Turbo Pascal, it was minimal, yet elegant. The only thing that drove me nuts was that Pascal was like BASIC--different variations for different Pascal versions. So you'd type in a Pascal program from BYTE magazine, and get many a strange error.
I had a friend that created a code editor for a language he created, the code editor was called Zeptor. No line numbering, inden
Re: (Score:2)
That was a lot of the learning, getting various dialects of programs to run and often just getting the program in the magazine to run as the program listings always seemed to have typos and worse.
Re: (Score:3)
Quite. I remember before college typing in BASIC programs from COMPUTE! magazine, and even with their entry checker that gave a checksum, sometimes there was something twitchy or glitchy. The indirect effect I saw was that it weeded out people from computer science then...
JoshK.
Those Borland languages (Score:2)
Those Borland packages of Turbo Pascal & Turbo C were nicely done. Very good documentation explaining all the functions and, as an added bonus, source code was included for ...er... something. It might be a chess game, a calculator, a spreadsheet, and maybe more that I can't remember. Nice memories.
Re: (Score:3)
The Borland products were so solid. I remember Microsoft was making "Quick" versions of languages/IDEs as competitors. They were nice, but not as robust as the Borland products (but also quite a bit cheaper). I do remember, however, you could call up the developer teams at Microsoft and they'd fax you small white-papers and articles on how to do things... sort of like a rudimentary stack exchange. This was back in the late 80s. They had Quick Pascal, and Quick C. Quick Basic was the only one that seem
Re: (Score:2)
Oh yes, the documentation was amazing, particularly compared to what we now have for many languages.
Re: (Score:2)
I learned both early Visual Basic and Java through the sheer fact of reading a) the Visual Basic Language Reference and b) an O'Reilly Java book.
Both had the complete language described, full descriptions of every command, "library", etc. even listing of all the constants.
It seems a really dumb thing, because I'm far from a hard-copy person, but having the entire language in a single book was amazing for reference, and also for flicking through and saying "Ah, that could be useful!". I'd been programming i
Re: (Score:2)
I learned OOP principles from reading Borland's Object Pascal manuals. I had "acquired" Turbo Pascal but saved enough from my newspaper route to buy Object Pascal when it came out and that set me up for a lifetime of documentation disappointment in everything after that. I guess a decade or so later O'Reilly started to close that gap.
Not really an Apple ][e if you're using the Z80 (Score:2)
Ahem, it's not really running on an Apple ][e if you're using the Z80 card. That's an entire computer on an add-on board.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It depends on the Z80 card. I used the Applicard Z80B in my Apple ][+ clone. When booting, it would download the BIOS and BDOS into the 6502 and run that portion. It also used the 6502 memory as a print buffer. I had an additional 128k as a ramdisk.
Not Quite (Score:2)
The Franklin Ace 1000 was *VERY* close in compatibility with the Apple2 series. The ROM calls even lined up (CALL -151, anyone?) BUT it was NOT completely so. Sometime in the early-mid 1980's I wrote a fairly simple AppleSoft BASIC program (alas, I forget the exact details) that would run just fine on actual Apple hardware, but would fail on Franklins. This made no sense. I wound up changing the program a bit to make it simpler, if less efficient, and THEN it would also run of the Frankins. So, not TRULY fu
Re: (Score:2)
That's kind of surprising. I'd have thought Franklin would have done what the Lazer did, license Applesoft from Microsoft. I could see slight variations in the monitor and IO space and perhaps timing.
I had a II+ clone, a Cherry or something. It was very compatible except for some Apple programs that looked in the ROM for the APPLE II+ that was displayed on boot, easy to fix by changing a branch instruction.
Those were the days.... (Score:5, Interesting)
I purchased a Kaypro II sometime in late '84 or early '85 and pretty quickly started working with Turbo Pascal, along with a fair bit of dBase II mixed in.
My last major Turbo Pascal effort was my senior project for my undergrad degree (computer science, of course) working on a PC XT. I also picked up copies of Turbo C, Turbo Assembler, Power Basic, dBase III and Clipper to round out my preferred tools for playing around.
In my professional career I got pretty heavy into FORTRAN IV, COBOL and dBase IV. I sure do miss those days 8^)
Ah, Turbo Pascal (Score:2)
Yes indeed, I too did some serious hacking with that compiler! Cheap, small, fast, fairly tight code ... and the ability to integrate assembly language and really speed things up!