On Mon, 2026-06-22 at 16:34 -0400, Paul Koning via cctalk wrote: > > > Taos, the operating system for the DEC Systems Research Center > > Firefly multiprocessor workstation, was written in Modula-2+, which > > added threads, garbage collection, and runtime type dispatch to > > Modula-2. History and documentation of Modula-2+ (and Taos) are > > available here: > > https://softwarepreservation.computerhistory.org/modula2+/ > > Modula-2-pllus also spread from SRC into the DECnet architecture > group, where we adopted it as the language for writing the pseudocode > for the algoritms in all the Phase V specs.
Modula-2 was the germ for a lot of good ideas, some of which Wirth backtracked on with Oberon. The best example is Ada, which has Wirth's fingerprints all over it, even though he was not an official part of any of its requirements development or detailed design. The main failure of Modula-2 was not standardizing I/O, which COBOL, Fortran, Pascal, and Ada all did. I wrote a lot of Modula code, but it wasn't transportable because I had to re-write the I/O for every different compiler + runtime library. I eventually wrote my own I/O layer so that I could cope with incompatibilities in one place instead of everywhere. Same as Dave Parnas's 1972 idea for modular programming (but Geschke and Mitchell had a better idea in MESA — uniform syntax — which Douglas Ross had earlier described).
