Thinking Back on ‘Turbo Pascal’ as It Turns 40

Posted on December 4, 2023 by Blake Patterson

November marked the 40th anniversary of Turbo Pascal, the first Integrated Development Environment (or IDE), which allowed a user to quickly and easily write a program in the Pascal programming language and see it compiled and linked — all in one go — with an executable dropped to disk at the end. Much simpler a process than the traditional model of programming in a text editor, using a compiler to convert the source into object code (often over several passes), and running a linker to integrate any required libraries, Turbo Pascal was friendly, fast, and cheap. Created by Anders Hejlsberg, the development package was released by Borland in November 1983 at a price of $49.99 for both CP/M and DOS-based systems.

Created by Niklaus Wirth in 1970, Pascal is a small and efficient procedural programming language that is easy to use and, thanks to its structured programming nature, was often employed as a language for learning programming concepts at a level higher than traditional, early BASIC. It is in this capacity that I had my first hands-on experiences with the language in an A.P. Computer Science class I took in high school during the late ’80s. Here, at its 40th anniversary, I thought I would share the memories I have of spending time with Turbo Pascal.

Having joined the ranks of the home computing at age 10 on Christmas 1982 and become instantly swept up in all of it, I quickly learned BASIC (in the backroom of a Singer sewing machine store down at the mall, which is a story on its own) and was poring over computer books and magazines constantly. So, I had heard of Pascal. In fact, Texas Instruments offered a UCSD Pascal p-System for my beloved TI-99/4A, which allowed the system to access a large library of Pascal programs out there via their P-Code card which provided a virtual machine for running these platform-agnostic programs, though I never owned that hardware.

Flash forward to my junior year of high school when I took the aforementioned A.P. Computer Science class, taught by the late Col. Ken Jenkins, at Hampton Roads Academy in Newport News, Virginia. At the time, the school had a computer lab full of Apple IIe computers used for teaching BASIC programming and for typing classes. For the APCS class, four or five DOS PCs were setup along the back wall, featuring lovely, amber MDA displays (pictured). These were the systems our small APCS class (I think there were only about five or six of us) used for Pascal classwork, which was done in Turbo Pascal v4 for DOS. (In retrospect, they should also have dropped Z-80 cards in a few of those Apple IIes — the CP/M version of Borland’s IDE ran well in that environment.) The class was a lot of fun and it was great getting my first taste of procedural programming. (And there was a particularly memorable anecdote about a lesson on the unary minus, I recall — but that’s a story for another time.)

I was so enamored by procedural programming and the ease of putting together little projects that could be written, compiled, and tested so easily that I sold my Atari Mega ST2 system and replaced it with a DOS machine, a Tandy 1000TL, in order to be able to use Turbo Pascal at home and to my heart’s content. That’s a fun time to think back on, writing little widget programs doing nothing of consequence just for fun and uploading them to local BBSs.

A couple of years later I had moved on to an Amiga 2000 and was attending college at Christopher Newport University pursuing a Computer Science degree. One of the first programming classes I found myself in used a Pascal compiler running on a PR1ME minicomputer that students dialed into on a 7-bit connection, using Kermit to transfer files, as I recall. Wanting to be able to work on my Pascal programs locally rather than waiting for the mini’s modem pool to be free, I purchased the Macintosh version of Turbo Pascal in hopes of running it on the A-Max Mac emulator I had for my Amiga. It ended up working rather well for me, though the short-lived Mac version was limited in some ways.

Continue reading →
Posted in Amiga, DOS / Win PC, Down Memory Lane, Just Rambling, Multi-Platform, Other Platform, Programming | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Lost Amiga “Four-Byte Burger” Painting Digitally Recreated (And Looking Amazing in Glowing Phosphor!)

Posted on April 24, 2023 by Blake Patterson
test

It was in the late summer of 1985 when I first heard of the Amiga. I learned about the forthcoming system in an issue of Personal Computing magazine that featured the Amiga on its cover and contained an in-depth dive into the what was the most amazing computer — by an incredible margin — I had ever seen. The specifications I read and the photos I saw within made such an impact on me that I wrote a post to this blog about the magazine itself, A Look at the Sauciest Magazine I Ever Owned, about ten years ago.

4 Byte Burger

The magazine’s deep dive into the Amiga (take a look for yourself) featured various examples of graphics created on the system, the most impressive of which — to my eye — was entitled “Four-Byte Burger,” a whimsical and lovely, exploded digital painting of a floppy-disk cheeseburger of sorts created by Jack Haeger, Director of Amiga’s Art and Graphics Department at the time. The 32-color image utilized the Amiga’s 4096-color palette to produce graphics the likes of which I had never seen before. (At the time, I was using an Apple II that was 6-colors only, basically.) A short time later the premier issue of AmigaWorld magazine appeared on the shelf, also featuring the image within, and finally after the launch of the system, “Four-Byte Burger” made its way to the inner covers of the Graphicraft paint program’s user manual which is the source of the high-res scan I was able to secure a few years back.

Around the time of that earlier post, I tried to track down a digital copy of the image, but to no avail. It wasn’t in the Amiga Graphics Archive, or seemingly anywhere else I looked. I came to find out that “Four-Byte Burger,” along with several other early Amiga paintings featured in these magazines, were created with a version of Graphicraft so early in development that it did not yet feature file I/O capabilities. These images were drawn, the CRT display was photographed, and then those lovely pixels were cast into the void when power was taken from system RAM with the flick of a switch.

These images, in digital form at least, were lost to time…like tears in rain.

Luckily, I wasn’t the only one that had been carrying that image around in his head for the past 40 years or so. Stuart Brown, YouTuber XboxAhoy who is renowned in gamer circles, recently posted to his video game documentary channel a video in which he laments the loss of this memorable image and sets out to recreate it based on the photographs we have available. This digital restoration was an arduous process, and it is fully documented by the benevolent restorer in his video. And, in the end, I believe he achieved his goal. The results bring an enormous smile to my face.

Once I watched this amazing video, I immediately knew that I had to get this piece of digital artistry that’s so beloved to me onto the glowing phosphor screen of my Amiga 1000. Ahoy was kind enough to provide a link to the resulting Amiga IFF image file when asked, so I loaded it onto the Parceiro device’s SD card and after waiting for the 1080 monitor to degauss post-rotation (I encountered the same obscured color due to the Earth’s magnetic field that he did in his video), I beheld an incredible sight indeed: an Amiga 1000 displaying its very best image — and on my desk — in the Byte Cellar.

Thanks, Ahoy.

Posted in Amiga, Down Memory Lane | Tagged , | 4 Comments

“MuffinTerm”: A Great New Terminal App for BBSing on iPhone, iPad, and Mac

Posted on January 25, 2023 by Blake Patterson

Readers can find quite a few posts on this blog about my enjoyment of modern-day BBSing — “dialing in” to online Bulletin Board Systems that can still be found out there on the net. I consider BBSing to be a wonderful opportunity to sit down in front of the various systems in my collection and spend time with them — to put them to use. The process itself, involving vintage hardware, I find to be quite satisfying and the online discussions I’m part of in the message areas of these BBSs are a lot of fun as well. As such, there are certainly times when I want to login and check messages but it’s not possible or convenient to go down into the cellar and fire up an old system.

Being primarily a Mac user (when it comes to modern systems), I will usually use my MacBook Air and iTerm 2 or, if I need something beyond VT100 emulation, SyncTerm to login. These work well enough, but I need to have my Mac with me to use them, and of course I often don’t.

A while back, I spent a considerable amount of time (and money, actually) trying out various enterprise-targeted terminal apps in the iOS / iPadOS App Store that claim to offer some of the emulations I need for proper BBSing, but not a single one of them ever managed to pull it off. Some have ANSI emulation but lack the extended character sets needed to render the “ANSI art“-style login screens and menus used by many of the BBSs out there. And, you can just forget about emulation of anything like the Commodore 64’s PETSCII or the Atari 8-bit’s ATASCII character sets. So, proper BBSing on the devices that I do have with me most of the time has been a no-go.

That is, until now.

A new terminal program called MuffinTerm has recently appeared in the iOS / iPadOS App Store and the Mac App Store that is specifically designed for telnet BBSing. Oh, and it’s free.

Continue reading →
Posted in BBS, Handhelds, iOS, Macintosh | 7 Comments

Have a Helping of 8-bit Holiday Cheer! (2022 Edition)

Posted on December 25, 2022 by Blake Patterson
Pixellated 8-bit style plastic Christmas wreath

‘Tis the season, and that means it’s time to push out the eleventh annual Byte Cellar vintage computer Holiday demo roundup so everyone can feel that warm, fuzzy, pixellated holiday glow (which I think we could all especially use this year). With scanlines. Enjoy!

I’ve been a computer geek for a long time now, but I’ve been enjoying The Holidays even longer…

I got my first computer, a TI-99/4A, on Christmas morning in 1982. I was 10 years old and from that Christmas on, it was nothing but games and computer hardware that I wanted Santa to leave me under the tree. On through my teenage years, part of my ritual for getting into the Holiday spirit was downloading and watching Christmas demos on whatever system I had at the time. And, apparently I wasn’t alone in this, as Benj Edwards explains in his piece, “The Oddball, Nostalgia-Inducing Christmas Tech Art Of The 1980s And 1990s.”

Enjoying these demos is a personal tradition that I had, sadly, long left behind until 2010 (the year before I began writing these posts) when I was inspired to seek out the demo I remember best, Audio Light’s 1985 musical slideshow for the Atari ST. With the help of an emulator, I captured it to share online with readers. A year later, I fired it up again and watched it run through it’s 16-color, pixellated images and 3-voice musical holiday greetings. As I watched, it occurred to me that it might be nice to gather a few of the other demos I remember from the good ole’ days and present them here, in order to try to share some of the holiday cheer that they used to inspire within me.

The following list of demos ranges across a variety of platforms of olde and is sure to bring the warmth of the season to the hearts of any and all retrocomputing enthusiasts who behold it. Happy holidays, and I hope you enjoy the shows!

Be sure to also have a look at the dozens of demos gathered through the years in the 2021 edition, the 2020 edition, the 2019 edition, the 2018 edition, the 2017 edition and the 2011 – 2016 editions of this post.

Commodore 64 — Christmas Around the World by Kermit R. Woodall (1987)
PC DOS — Sierra Christmas Card 1992 (in VGA, played on Roland MT-32) by Sierra (1992)
Atari ST — Done and Dusted by Genesis Project (2020)
Apple II — Apple II Christmas Demo 2022 by Call -151 (2022)
Continue reading →
Posted in Holidays, Multi-Platform | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

It’s a MIDI Christmas With the Atari ST for “Holiday Music Week X”

Posted on December 23, 2022 by Blake Patterson

As I type this we are in the middle of the tenth annual Holiday Music Week over at r/Retrobattlestations. For this season’s contest, I decided to interface my wife’s Radio Shack music keyboard with my Atari 520ST using its built-in MIDI ports and let the system do a bit of caroling.

One of the first programs I ever had on my original 520ST back in 1986 was a Christmas slideshow and music demo from Audio Light, Inc. The graphics in the slideshow were drawn by Peter Wickman with Audio Light’s N-Vision paint program and the music was surely created with some iteration of The Music Studio, a music composition program also created by Audio Light.

Back in 2010 I wrote a short post on this blog about this demo and uploaded a video of it running under emulation. In fact, it was that post that kicked off my yearly Holiday Demos posts that have been going for over 10 years now. One thing in this demo that always got my attention was the last line on the final, informational slide that says, “If you have a MIDI instrument, plug it in!” And, so, I bought some cables and have done just that!

Without further ado, for Holiday Music Week X I present the 1985 Audio Light holiday slideshow and music presentation, as played by my Atari 520ST and the Radio Shack MD-981 MIDI keyboard (which was likely produced for Radio Shack by Casio).

Here’s wishing all of my vintage computing readers a wonderful Holiday Season and a bright New Year!

Visit a gallery of all my r/Retrobattlestations entry photos. A complete list, with links, of the fun I've had with challenges in that subreddit over the years can be seen below. Good times!

Posted in Atari, Holidays, r/Retrobattlestations | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Configure Your Mac to Allow Vintage Computers to “Dial In” [Updated]

Posted on November 28, 2022 by Blake Patterson

As regular readers are aware, I enjoy spending time logged in to a few personal favorites of the myriad telnet bulletin board systems that are presently online and serving as discussion communities for their users. As often as I can, I use one of my vintage systems to “dial” in and read the latest gossip rather than a modern Mac or PC. I use serial-to-WiFi bridge devices to make the process simple and as clutter-free as possible.

Another “modern day” (if you can call it that) use of these vintage systems I like to engage in is keeping an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) instance open on this or that system to glance at across the room and occasionally wheel my chair over and chat a bit on said system. (I hope you didn’t learn about IRC on TV…) This pursuit is less well served by the aforementioned serial-to-WiFi bridges given that many of the systems on my desks lack a proper IRC client. If I want to use such systems to IRC, the best way to go, from my perspective, is to telnet into my always-on desktop Mac and launch my go-to IRC client, the terminal-based irssi, which works quite well as accessed from a remote VT100 terminal. And, nearly all of the systems in question have VT100 emulation supported by a several software terminal emulator programs such as ProTerm on my favorite vintage IRC system, the Apple IIe to my left.

For years (and on many different systems) I would achieve this by utilizing a USB-to-serial adapter on the Mac and running a serial cable from the vintage system in question to said adapter on the Mac. But it was a cumbersome process. And, several OS updates ago Apple redid the USB stack in macOS and rendered the adapters I had on-hand inoperable. To get around this I setup a Raspberry Pi connected via WiFi to my network, specifically to serve as the host system for the remote terminal, as it maintained support for my adapters — it worked (video), but it was a configuration I was never really happy with.

WiFi232 WiFi modem bridge device

So, I headed to the Apple II Infinitum Slack channel and asked if it was possible to setup a listener on the desktop Mac to allow a vintage system equipped with a serial-to-WiFi adapter to “dial in” to the Mac and be granted a wireless terminal connection. It turned out, it was.

I learned that in a few simple steps you can setup a listener macOS daemon that will allow an incoming telnet connection to a specified port and present a shell session with a login prompt where you can login and execute terminal commands. When I do so, I’m usually there to launch irssi and connect to an IRC server, but other commands work nicely, such as the system monitor top, if you want to keep an eye on how things are doing when fullscreen apps are hogging the displays. (Another nice terminal-based IRC client is WeeChat, by the way.)

I currently have this arrangement up and running on my 2022 Mac Studio (M1 Max) but I originally set this up on the 2017 5K iMac (Intel Core i5) — it will work on either Apple Silicon or Intel-based systems. Here’s how to do it.

Continue reading →
Posted in Apple II, BBS, Macintosh, Other Platform, Serial Terminal | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

A Secret Apple Silicon Extension to Accommodate an Intel 8080 Artifact

Posted on November 16, 2022 by Blake Patterson

Lately I’ve been spending time on Mastodon for … reasons. Here’s my link: https://oldbytes.space/@blakespot. In my recently active time on the platform, I have found quite a few excellent retrocomputing-related posts by creative members of the community. One such post, by Dougall, links to his blog post entitled “Why is Rosetta 2 fast?“.

Rosetta 2 is the ahead-of-time compile translator that’s part of macOS Big Sur (and later) that, upon launch of an x64 Intel binary, translates it to 64-bit ARM code for execution on ARM-based Apple Silicon processors before execution. It is not a real-time emulator. It translates the entire binary — once — at launch time, making best-guess choices along the way. Dougall delves into various aspects of Rosetta 2 in an effort to explain why it is so performant; in many instances the translated binary runs faster on Apple Silicon than on the fastest Intel machines that Apple has ever released. It’s impressive.

It’s a fascinating read for a tech nerd like me that has a particular interest in OS technology. But one detail of the post really grabbed my attention.

Apple’s secret extension

There are only a handful of different instructions that account for 90% of all operations executed, and, near the top of that list are addition and subtraction. On ARM these can optionally set the four-bit NZVC register, whereas on x86 these always set six flag bits: CF, ZF, SF and OF (which correspond well-enough to NZVC), as well as PF (the parity flag) and AF (the adjust flag).

Emulating the last two in software is possible (and seems to be supported by Rosetta 2 for Linux), but can be rather expensive. Most software won’t notice if you get these wrong, but some software will. The Apple M1 has an undocumented extension that, when enabled, ensures instructions like ADDS, SUBS and CMP compute PF and AF and store them as bits 26 and 27 of NZCV respectively, providing accurate emulation with no performance penalty.

Intrigued by mention of this “secret extension,” I reached out to the author and asked if he could expand on what Apple has done here. And, he obliged. As he explained in his multi-part Mastodon response:

Continue reading →
Posted in Macintosh, OS | Tagged , , , , | 13 Comments

“4K Scaling” Is Not a Problem on Modern Macs

Posted on November 8, 2022 by Blake Patterson

I found myself posting this information so frequently on forum threads and in video comments that I wanted to put it all together in one place so that I can share my experience and what I’ve learned with a single link. And, while this is primarily a vintage computing blog, not every post is of that nature. Apologies to my retro-only readers. (Well, there is an Amiga and a Lisa in that second photo down the page, there, so…)

I recently replaced my aging 2017 5K Retina iMac with a Mac Studio, powered by an M1 Max processor and 32GB of RAM. Some months earlier I upgraded my aging laptop to a 2022 M2 MacBook Air. That iMac’s beautiful 27-inch, 5K retina display was hard to part with, and so I wanted to give the new desktop system a very nice screen. And I have, in the form of an LG DualUp 28-inch display.

It’s an unusual display; it is a 16:18 aspect panel with a native resolution of 2560×2880. It is “tall” in its normal orientation, but I’ve chosen to use it rotated which makes it look rather square (a great orientation for this display). A perfect screen for my use cases as a general UNIX system and web development workstation. (I do not game on my desktop Mac nor do I watch feature films, so a more traditional 16:9 aspect ration has little value to me here.) I’ve had this system up and running for two months now and I can say that, of all the displays I’ve ever used, this one is my favorite.

Doing research to spec out the screen for this iMac replacement, I encountered a large number of people lamenting the use of 4K displays with Macs, noting that the Apple 5K displays, with a 218 pixel/inch density, allow for a computationally easy halving of the native display resolution to achieve an ideal desktop rendering. A 5K Apple display has a native resolution of 5120×2880 and the default view mode is a “looks like” 2560×1440 desktop — razor sharp. Halving the native display resolution is easy peasy for GPU hardware — a small lift. This is, presumably, why Apple’s Retina displays are 5K rather than 4K. The thing with 4K displays is that in their typical native 3840×2160 resolution, they present the UI elements far too small, while the system-suggested half-resolution rendering is a sharp “looks like” 1920×1080 display where the UI elements appear too large — there’s too little desktop real estate.

The way around this is to have macOS “scale” the display to a more ideal lower resolution, but choosing that option in display preferences presents a warning: “Using a scaled resolution may affect performance.” What the OS does here is to scale up the chosen resolution to double height and double width (4x the pixels displayed) and then scale them back down to the display’s native resolution — 60 times per second. Indeed, this can be too much for certain older systems out there. But, as you will see, modern Macs should be able to handle the task just fine.

My display, which has a ~140 pixel/inch density (close that of a typical 4K display), is scaling to a “looks like” resolution of 2304×2048. This means that macOS renders my desktop at 4608×4096 (18.9 million pixels) and then scales it down to the panel’s native (rotated) 2880×2560 — 60 times per second. (The “looks like” target for a standard 4K display with a native resolution of 3840×2160 will typically be 2560×1440 and, thus, it gets scaled up 5120×2880 (14.7 million pixels) and then back down to the panel’s native resolution.) This all sounds harrowing, and many threads of concern have been created, talking about the dramatic performance impact that this scaling busywork necessarily has on the system. Among them is this frequently cited video created by a person who indicates that the performance of their M1 MacBook Pro was so dramatically impacted by a scaled 4K display that they returned it and got a more traditional, low-DPI 2K display.

This guy’s experience makes no sense to me.

Continue reading →
Posted in Just Rambling, Macintosh | Tagged , | 27 Comments

An Apple II Tale Told Complete by the Late Tony Diaz

Posted on October 29, 2022 by Blake Patterson

I’ve been an active IRC users for nearly 25 years now, and for many of those years I was a denizen of the #a2c.chat channel on the irc.a2central.com IRC server. (IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat, a channel-based internet text chat system that was introduced in 1988.) That’s where I met Tony Diaz. Long a key figure in the yearly KansasFest Apple II gathering and possessing of an enormous personal collection (there were palettes) of Apple II-related hardware including the extremely rare, Tony was a fervent Apple II enthusiast and an absolute font of knowledge regarding all things Apple II. Regrettably, Tony died unexpectedly on October 27th near his home in Oceanside, CA. As I write this post, we have been without Tony for exactly one year — a year that the Apple II community has been bereft of one of its brightest stars, a friendly figure quick to lend a hand.

I met Tony in person but once, when he stopped by my home on a larger trip in order to pick up a NeXT 21-inch Color Display I had offered him and gave me a tour of the unicorn-rare prototype “Mark Twain” Apple IIgs he had packed in his PT Cruiser. It is IRC where I knew Tony, and we had many conversations over the year about this or that obscure aspect of Apple II computing. Having not only been an extreme Apple II hobbyist buy also having worked in Apple II-related and general hardware capacities, Tony had many stories to share. Here, a year after his passing, I share the one I found the most fascinating.

One day in early 2014 on IRC, I DM’ed Tony asking if he had any 65C02 CPUs and the proper ROMs lying around to enable me to upgrade an Apple IIe I had just acquired from eBay to an Enhanced IIe. I mentioned that I couldn’t even boot the Copy II Plus 9 disk I had on hand (a very popular copy program / system utility for the Apple II from Central Point Software) on that machine in its current configuration. Tony quipped that C2P 9 was junk anyway, and that I should use C2P 8. I asked after this, and he explained that C2P 9 was buggy, a total rewrite from the ground up due to the fact that the source code for C2P 8 had been lost. I asked if he knew the story behind that and, unsurprisingly, he was one of the few people in the world that did, and he proceeded to tell me the whole story.

What follows is a tale involving several amazing and unlikely finds coupled with a good bit of luck that, in the end, explains how that source code came to be lost, necessitating Central Point to entirely rewrite a core product. The story takes place in the early ’90s, when Tony was working at Alltech, a tech clearinghouse of sorts that sold old / hard to find items, much of it for the Apple II.

Continue reading →
Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments

Microsoft Sunsets Amiga’s Killer App: Internet Explorer

Posted on June 16, 2022 by Blake Patterson

It’s been nearly 27 years but, as life teaches us, all good things must come to an end. On June 15th, Microsoft ended support for Internet Explorer on all desktop systems, including its launch platform, the Commodore Amiga.

Or, so it would seem.

Microsoft tweeted the news yesterday from its official @MicrosoftEdge account. In the poignant tweet, the Redmond software giant bade farewell to its venerable web browser, stating with some sadness, “Now, it’s time to surf the big web in the sky,” while marking the woeful moment with an animated image of IE’s orbited-“e” logo, centered on a glowing blue screen which fades out to darkness on an Amiga 1000 computer.

As someone whose 23 year web development career has been made rather “challenging” on many occasions thanks to Internet Explorer and its many unfortunate virtues, this seems its perfect epitaph: A browser released in 1995 for Microsoft’s new, preemptive multitasking OS, Windows 95, memorialized on the screen of an Amiga, a graphics computer released by Commodore in 1985 that brought the first preemptive multitasking OS to the consumer market — ten years earlier. It wasn’t a DOS machine, it didn’t run Windows, and it never ran Internet Explorer.

RIP and good riddance, IE.

Posted in Amiga, Windows | Tagged , , , , , , , | 9 Comments