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From: Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: The joy of FORTRAN
Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2024 07:31:32 -1000
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scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) writes:
> VAX-11 Pascal, on the other hand, was wonderful. Enough useful
> extensions to make it a very viable systems programming language.

I was at San Jose Research, but doing some amount of work out at Los
Gatos lab and they let me have part of a wing with offices and
lab. They were doing lots of work with "TWS", from Metaware (in santa
cruz) ... and had implemented 370 Pascal which they used for developing
VLSI tools. It was eventually released to customers as VS/Pascal.

I used it to rewrite VM370 spool running in virtual address space and
some number of other VM370 features.

In the early 90s, IBM was going through its troubles and selling off
and/or offloading lots of stuff (real estate, divisions, etc), including
lots of VLSI tools to industry VLSI tools vendor. However, the standard
VLSI shop was SUN machines and so everything had to be ported to SUN.

I had left IBM, but got a contract from Los Gatos to port a 50,000
statement VS/Pascal VLSI design tool to SUN. Ran into all sorts of
problems, it was easy to drop by SUN up the road, but they had
outsourced SUN pascal to a organization on the opposite of the world, so
anything required at least a day's turn around. In retrospect, SUN
pascal seemed to have been used for little else than academic
instruction ... and it would have been easier to have rewritten the
whole thing in C.

-- 
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970