Thursday, August 14, 2003
Terak and Perq
My recent post about Delphi and Pascal got me thinking about UCSD Pascal which got me thinking about the first personal computer I ever programmed on. It was a Terak 8510 that could run DEC RT-11 or UCSD Pascal. I think I still have a few of the 8 inch floppies lying around from the Terak. I learned a lot while hacking away on that system. It was my first exposure to raster graphics display tricks, Pascal, PDP-11 assembler, TECO, etc. Compared to the time share systems of that time, it was nerdvana.
A year later I got to work on a Perq which was, more or less, a commercial version of the Xerox Alto. The Perq was very cool, the first personal computer to support 3M (one mega-byte of memory, one mega-flop of processing power and one mega-pixel of display bits). 3M seems puny now but when the Perq was designed, even the idea of a "personal" computer seemed like a distant goal.
A year later I got to work on a Perq which was, more or less, a commercial version of the Xerox Alto. The Perq was very cool, the first personal computer to support 3M (one mega-byte of memory, one mega-flop of processing power and one mega-pixel of display bits). 3M seems puny now but when the Perq was designed, even the idea of a "personal" computer seemed like a distant goal.
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