In Wirth's history it was Pascal, Modula, Oberon I think. I learned
Pascal on a VAX and an Apple 2 at the same time for an Apple 2
project, skipped Modula (and Ada), played with Oberon some. Borland's
Turbo Pascal screamed, I wrote a lot of Delphi too. Lazarus suffers
from having too many authors, it's too disorganized. Borland undercut
everybody on price I think, Turbo Pascal started at something like $30
when everybody else was charging $200+?
I remember seeing some APL but FORTRAN seemed more useful. I think I
only knew 1 person who used APL.
FWIW I've never owned a Microsoft mouse, always Logitech. Never paid
money for a Microsoft product period.
On 1/10/17, Mark Morgan Lloyd <markmll.debian-...@telemetry.co.uk> wrote:
> On 10/01/17 17:30, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
>> On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 08:17:59AM +0000, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
>>> On 09/01/17 22:00, Gene Heskett wrote:
>>>> On Monday 09 January 2017 10:52:46 Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Logitech should have stuck to selling compilers.
>>>>>
>>>> Thats a different company I believe.
>>>
>>> Same company, I was their de-facto UK tech support for a while. Long
>>> predated Linux of course (in a nod to the fact that we're wandering way
>>> OT).
>>
>> Logitech made software and mice right from the start, and only got into
>> compilers (module-2 I believe) a bit later (although not very much later
>> it seems)
>
> I've just managed to rescue a bunch of Logitech compiler manuals (I've
> recently had to sacrifice a lot of old stuff) with the hope of at least
> getting a photo of their early products into Wp to keep the knowledge
> alive. The v3 copyright notices start off at 1984 (v2 might have earlier
> dates but I can't see where I've put it), and I am pretty sure that that
> predates their mice; my recollection is that Mouse Systems and "PC
> Mouse" which might or might not have been distinct had the market to
> themselves in the earliest days.
>
> Logitech started to walk away from compilers and concentrate on
> peripherals when they bought a small company (AMS?) in Warrington
> ("where the wodka comes from") that made mice etc. for the likes of
> Amstrad computers, AIUI they also had... errm... personnel problems
> which effectively resulted in their shutting down the UK office (a
> nicely-appointed tithe barn somewhere in the Home Counties, possibly
> Berkshire but I forget the exact location).
>
> Of course, Logitech's M2 was challenged by JPI/Topspeed which was bought
> out of Borland. legend had it that Borland effectively sabotaged the
> 8-bit variant by retaining the manual copyright and refusing to reprint,
> but the 16-bit variants did fairly well for a while until they had...
> errm... personnel problems in their USA office which effectively forced
> them to sell out to Clarion.
>
> I supported the Logitech compiler being used for embedded '186 work at
> Lowbrow Uni in the mid-80s, and later did a fair amount of embedded work
> using TopSpeed (bare-metal '286 code). These days of course one would
> use ARM for comparable jobs, with or without a standard OS.
>
> --
> Mark Morgan Lloyd
> markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk
>
> [Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]
>
>
--
Credit is the root of all evil. - AB1JX
