Thread by @conways_law

The Connection Between Watergate and Mac Pascal

This is a story of a long-shot software startup.

In the early 1970s I had several consulting gigs with Monroe Calculator in which I built three things for them:
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...firmware for a 6502-based cartridge-programmed calculator, a minicomputer-based domain-specific language compiler for a typewriter-based billing machine imported from Triumph-Adler in Germany, and…
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...the basic logic design for a programmable calculator based on the new TTL-MSI 74181 4-bit arithmetic-logic unit. (That one didn’t ship; the others made production.)
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That billing machine was a low-ball story. The developers were high-school-graduate non-programmers and the input media were IBM Porta-Punch cards. The input device was a stylus for punching pre-scored holes in the card on which my domain-specific language was pre-printed.
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There was only one card type; designing that DSL was an illuminating exercise. The tool I wrote was a pair of long trays of FORTRAN cards for the Data General Nova, which read the PortaPunch cards and punched paper tapes for an EPROM programmer for the billing machine.
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At nights I hung out at the Saddle Brook NJ Marriott. While the Watergate hearings were going on I watched them on my room TV; otherwise I was drawing in my record book the data structures for a compiler-free immediate-turnaround Pascal that I had in mind.
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This eventually became Mac Pascal, introduced in 1984. How that happened might be a useful story for you out there with product dreams. It’s a message about how many things might have to come together just right for something to happen.
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One of the people I got to know well at Monroe eventually left to become a manager at Rockwell International in Newport Beach, CA. Rockwell was second-sourcing the MOS Technology 6502, a brilliant 8-bit design that was the heart of the Apple 2.
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He was managing the AIM-65, a single-board computer used for development and as a basis of 6502-based devices. The AIM-65 had a Teletype-33-style keyboard, a 20-character thermal tape printer, a 20-character alphanumeric LED single-line display,
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...4KBytes of RAM, 5 sockets for 4KByte ROMs, digital I/O pins, and audio I/O for an audio-cassette tape recorder (the typical external storage device at the time). All on about a square foot of PC board.
oldcomputers.net/AIM-65.html
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In 1979 I visited my friend and pitched a “Pascal trainer” for the AIM-65. We eventually made a deal and I later delivered it on 5 4KB ROMs that fit in the 5 ROM sockets on the board.
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The AIM-65 had 4KB of RAM.

That was the design challenge: do a non-trivial immediate-turnaround Pascal trainer with 4KBytes of RAM. (It had the complete Pascal language except for records.) The editor was a line editor using the 20-character peripherals on the board.
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Some time after that I re-connected with Andrew Singer (now deceased). We decided to try to turn the idea into a product. Andrew had an Apple 2 and I bought an extension board for it, rebuilt my Pascal to work with the Apple 2 OS, and wire-wrapped the ROMs onto the board.
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I showed it to my neighbor Francis Girard (recently deceased), a telecom executive. Later, Frank mentioned it to Dan Fylstra, head of VisiCorp, the seller of VisiCalc.
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VisiCalc was the killer spreadsheet app for the Apple 2 that pushed IBM into the PC business. (They happened to be sitting next to each other on a flight.)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc
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Dan passed the word on to Mike Boich (this was in 1982) and we learned that he would like to see our “Instant Pascal”. Mike was the product manager for the Macintosh, something that was rumored to be in development, but about which the world knew very little.
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Andrew and I visited Mike and showed him our instant-turnaround no-compiler Apple 2 Pascal demo. I remember his words: “This solves a problem I have.” (I also remember being blown away by Mike’s demo of Microsoft Excel, dragging the column borders with the Mac mouse.)
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The problem Mike had was placing the Mac into undergraduate colleges, specifically their Computer Science programs. The recognized language for AP Computer Science had just changed from BASIC to Pascal and Apple needed a Pascal for the Mac.
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(Turbo Pascal was a very nice compiler for the IBM PC.)

On the basis of Mike’s need, Andrew, Frank Sinton and I were able to obtain VC funding for our startup Think Technologies.
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We built Mac Pascal, which Apple sold under its own label. It pioneered immediate-turnaround development tools; Andrew designed the innovative UI and I designed the internals based on my notes made in a New Jersey motel a decade earlier.
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