psc@lzwi.UUCP (Paul S. R. Chisholm) (07/13/85)
< I can use my magic to change the color to red -- but I don't do windows. >
To begin with, history; you can skip it if you really want. Not
counting an IBM 370/158, the first machine I ever ran Pascal on
was the original kind of Terak that Ken Bowles and his merry crew used
at the University of California at San Diego; an 8510a, I think. It
was powerful for the time (1979): an LSI-11, 64K memory (when all the
micros were limited to 48K), a memory-mapped display with graphics,
a detachable keyboard, and one single sided single density eight inch
floppy. With the UCSD Pascal system, I (and all the grubby
undergraduates) had all the computing power needed to hack all sorts of
Pascal programs. Ones that were several hundred lines long! (The
limitations were RAM, disk space, and how long the TI 800 took to print
the listings.)
Six years later, I was reading Peter Norton's PROGRAMMING THE IBM PC
(excellent book, by the way, much better than that thing from Sybex I've
been hearing about (I've read both)) when it hit me. I suddenly knew
the specs for the ideal UCSD system. It would have 128K RAM (64K for
the p-code instructions, 64K for the p-code program's data), additional
RAM for memory mapped video, a floppy disk drive, *and* a healthy amount
of ROM, including some that can somehow be added by a third party.
Do you recognize this, boys and girls? Can you say "pee sea june-yer"?
I knew you could. Now let's really go to the magic kingdom. . . .
This much power is enough to give UCSD some elbow room. On the other
hand, it's enough to let Borland's Turbo Pascal sing and dance, not to
mention fly. If you made up a ROM cartridge with the compiler and
editor in it, it'd hit Mach 1 (the speed of sound is much lower in a
dense medium, like a one disk system).
There's one other thing about PCjr's. A certain large company in the
computer industry is looking desperately for a way to write off about a
hundred thousand of the little beasties. (That number is a
conservatively low estimate. Rumors abound that IBM will literally
clear out their inventory with bulldozers.)
So, a modest proposal. How 'bout if someone takes these little boxes
off of IBM's hands for some generous sum (say, a hundred dollars
apiece). Add a Pascal cartridge. Bundle in a composite monochrome
monitor (if you can't get those for a hundred dollars apiece in
quantity, you're not trying). Okay, that's a cost of $250 for a Pascal
work station; sell it for $500. Can you work out an arrangement to sell
a multi-port printer buffer and an inexpensive printer for $500? I have
confidence in you.
Let's step back and look at what we have here. For a thousand dollars,
you have a decent Pascal development environment, one that can probably
blow the socks off an Apple Pascal system costing twice as much. For
two thousand dollars, you've got enough equipment to fill a small table,
just big enough to let three students work at once. For fourteen
thousand dollars, you can fill a small classroom with twenty-one PCs,
enough so that everyone in class can have their very own machine.
(Okay, in a college environment, people buddy up and get half a PC.)
You over there, with the AT with four megabytes of memory and the
seventy megabyte hard disk? You're not impressed? You with the
Microvax II on your desk, you're not impressed either? Well, I can
understand that.
How about you? Yeah, you, the teacher who finally started making
fourteen thousand dollars a year. The one who bought a TI 99/4 on
clearance for fifty dollars (out of your own pocket) and scrounged up an
old TV so your students could get their hands on a computer, *any*
computer. How many candy bars do you need to sell to raise two thousand
dollars?
Look, I didn't buy a PCjr last Christmas, and I won't this Christmas
either. I'm deciding between a hard disk, a color monitor, and a good
history with my mortgage company. But there are a hell of a lot of
schools, elementary through medical, that could use the "Pascal PC" I
outlined above. The PCjr may be mortally wounded from a lot of points
of view, but it could still be better by Thursday - and I'd much rather
see them distributed into America's classrooms than her landfills.
--
-Paul S. R. Chisholm The above opinions are my own,
{pegasus,vax135}!lzwi!psc not necessarily those of any
{mtgzz,ihnp4}!lznv!psc telecommunications company.
(*sigh* ihnp4!lzwi!psc does *NOT* work!!! Use above paths.)
"It must be fast, and it must be red, and it must have windows."