In 1983 I joined Digital Equipment and had access,first to the PDP-11 RSX-11M Pascal compiler (itself a P4 descendent) and a bit later the first versions of VAX/VMS Pascal. Thee compiler really worked on the KIM-1, since the compiler produces Px tapes and the interpreter loads these.
Alas, I could not do anything useful with all this since the KIM-1 has no suitable file system, tape is too slow for compiling, and so I stored paper and cassette tapes away. I did notice the similarity to the P4 compiler in the book by Steve Pemberton, P2 sources were not available to me then. My good friend Anton Muller managed to get the (earlier?) sources of the compiler (in Pascal) and the interpreter (assembler), all on paper photocopies and it was exciting to study those. No way a Pascal compiler was a viable option on a dual cassette player based KIM-1.Īt that moment I was finishing my Masters at the VU university in Amsterdam, in Computer Science, and was introduced to Pascal, compilers, the VU Pascal compiler, the books by Niklaus Wirth and that was all very exciting. I did this several times and then gave up. See the Userguide and required binaries here. Even with the automated control of two tape decks and hypertape, it took a long time to get something. Of course the compiler would find errors and then the editing and compiling cycle on a cassette based system could start again. The idea was great, the result was not very userfiendly: load Micro-Ade, edit a Pascal program, save to tape load the interpreter (4K), compiler (19K), compile the program by loading from tape, save the obejct to tape, load the object from tape, and run the program. The latest version is Pascal-M 2K1, a complete system to compile load link and run on the KIM-1 or the KIM-1 Simulator. Micro-Ade, the invaluable assembler/editor, was enhanced to edit Pascal program source. It was a complete package, on a KIM-1 cassette tape, and with some documentation. In 1978, via the dutch KIM-1 user club, a Pascal compiler, written by Mark Rustad, with a 6502 interpreter by G.J.