Xref: utzoo comp.lang.fortran:470 comp.lang.pascal:632 comp.sys.ibm.pc:12433
Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!van-bc!sl
From: sl@van-bc.UUCP (Stuart Lynne)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran,comp.lang.pascal,comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Pecan Software "steals" $100 from me
Message-ID: <1684@van-bc.UUCP>
Date: 25 Feb 88 10:33:14 GMT
References: <7432@ncoast.UUCP>
Reply-To: sl@van-bc.UUCP (Stuart Lynne)
Distribution: comp
Organization: Public Access Network, Vancouver, BC.
Lines: 65

In article <7432@ncoast.UUCP> btb@ncoast.UUCP (Brad Banko) writes:
>Several weeks ago, I posted an article about some interesting development
>products from:

>		Pecan Software Systems

>These include F77, UCSD Pascal, Modula2 & BASIC language systems available
>for a wide variety of machines (Amigas, IBM PC's, Atari ST's,
>PDP's, Macintoshes, and others).  The really neat thing about these
>systems is that they support a common Turtlegraphics graphics interface
>across machines, which I figured would be ideal for scientific
>applications programming.  It sounds almost too good to be true, and for me
>it was.  I ordered the F77 system for MSDOS to try out.

>	First mistake, they sent me the UCSD Pascal system instead of F77.
>I thought, "OK, I can play with this to get a feel for their stuff, and then
>send back the Pascal in exchange for F77."
>	It is a pretty nice little environment,
>but it has one "feature/bug" which really annoys me, Pecan apparently
>decided that they want to support a common development ENVIRONMENT
>across different machines, so they run their own "virtual" file system on
>top of MSDOS, so that all of your files reside in these huge MSDOS files,
>the size of which you must declare ahead of time.  I imagine that Pecan
>has modelled this system on the environment of UCSD Pascal, but on this I
>am only speculating, because I have never worked in a UCSD Pascal environment.

If I'm not mistaken Pecan *is selling* the UCSD Pascal System. Or at least a
derivitive of it. Softech (the Ada company) got the rights to UCSD Pascal
around about 1980 and created a company called Softech Microsystems, based
in San Diego to sell it. They did fairly well (this was pre IBM PC etc) for
a number of years. When the PC came out they where one of the three
operating systems available (CPM/86 and MS-DOS being the other two). Priced
like CPM/86 at something around $500 per copy compared to about $50 for
MS-DOS, it wasn't too long before MS-DOS became the de-facto standard for
the PC. 

About 1984 a small startup company called Borland launched a $49 Pascal
compiler which wasn't all the great, but at that price noboby seemed to
care. Within a year or two Softech had closed down Softech MicroSystems. They
apparantly sold the rights to the software to Pecan.

So I would presume that Pecan is simply selling all of the p-System (Softech
Microsystems name for their version of UCSD Pascal) for a price which would
have made a great deal of sense (in retrospect) in 1984, but is of historic 
interest only these days. 

I personally started and ran a company (Network Consulting Inc.) in 1981 which
developed and supported a better version of the p-System for the IBM PC than
was available from IBM. It too went the way of the dodo when the sales
dropped off in 1985 faster than we were able to skip over to the Unix market 
(which was a little to young to support well supported IBM Unix clones at that
time). 

For its time the p-System *was* a very nice little system. Fortran, Basic,
Pascal running on about ten different CPU's, with native code generation
available for use by customers in the field. You could sell *one* version of
a program to run on any of the target processors, regardless of byte sex
problems etc, the customer could convert it to native code for speed in the
field. Built in segment swapping allowed for very impressivly large programs
to be built (for that time period, 256kb systems were still pretty
standard). The biggest limitation was the 64kb data space.


-- 
{ihnp4!alberta!ubc-vision,uunet}!van-bc!Stuart.Lynne Vancouver,BC,604-937-7532