[dundee] My first opensource program 1983/4 or was it 5?

[Robert Ladyman]

Came across this recently (the discussion about line-editors led me to 
thinking about it: there was only a line-editor on this system, I think):-

http://www.sageandstride.org/html/software.html

I had to port our Omnis DBMS from USCD p-system to the Mirage O/S and from one 
version of Pascal (yes, Pascal) to the Swifte Pascal listed on this page 
(scroll down a bit): I also had to work on the multi-user locking (lucky me). 
There was no "make" program for the system, which was inconvenient to say the 
least for a DBMS consisting of many files of many lines. The first "open 
source" program I wrote was a make program for Mirage, in Swifte Pascal (it 
didn't have a C compiler at the time and I didn't have any Pascal source-code 
to go on): it wasn't called open source at the time, though, even though it 
was given away for the benefit of all users. The system as a whole went on to 
be used in flight booking for aircraft, if I remember correctly - you could 
have a number of serial terminals connected to the system and the 68000 
processor could handle a lot of load.

I also thought I'd found a bug in the Pascal compiler as the rounding 
behaviour differed between it and other implementations, however this turned 
out to be due to the Swifte's choice of rounding algorithm. Being in contact 
with the compiler makers did mean that they added a compiler flag (I think, it 
was a long time ago) to toggle the behaviour between their normal 
implementation and what we required. 

I'll go back to sleep now. Nurse! the screens.

-- 

Robert Ladyman
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