It was thus said that the Great Fred Cisin once stated: > On Wed, 18 May 2016, John Willis wrote: > >Let's not forget that the bulk of the Apple Lisa operating system and > >at least large parts of the original Macintosh system software were also > >implemented in Pascal (though IIRC hand-translated into 68k assembly > >language), which was a pretty big mainstream success for proving > >Pascal as suitable for developing systems software. > > At the time, it was sometimes interpreted differently: > "Apple hired brilliant people for the project. BUT, they had so little > real-world experience that they didn't even realize what a mistake it > would be to write an OS in a high level language. Apple had to rewrite it > in assembly for the Mac, to make it fast enough to be usable. Is Steve > Jobs color blind? He keeps trying to make machines with very high > resolution, but balck and white, and keeps trying to seal them off from > the rest of the world." (- cHead)
I thought the primary reason for the Pascal->hand assembly was more due to memory contraints (64K ROM, 128K RAM for the original Mac) than actual speed (although that too, was probably a concern). -spc
