The Sinclair QL Forum

I have now managed to acquire a suite of the TDI programs - there are some large manuals on UCSD Pascal, USCD Fortran, Applications Development Reference and a QL introductory booklet, along with the following microdrive cartridges:

From the TDI USCD Pascal
PASCAL P-System PASCAL (Pascal Compiler, Filer and Editor)
PASCAL P-System PBOOT (Pascal Bootstrap)
PASCAL P-System ASM (Assembler, Linker, Utilities) ** THIS IS CORRUPT **

From the Advanced Development Toolkit
P-System ADTK1 (Development Utilities)
P-System ADTK2 (Interface Units, Turtlegraphics)

From the TDI UCSD Fortran-77
FORTRAN P-System ASM (Assembler, Linker, Utilities)
FORTRAN P-System FMISC (Fortran Configuration Options) ** THIS IS CORRUPT **

Not sure what package this belongs to...
P-System SOURCES (Driver Sources)

This does at least go a long way to preserving this rare range of compilers - although the manuals are in the form of books, which would be a real pain to scan in.

I have not had chance to try any of this out - it does not help that most of the files are contained within a single container (pSystem) on each cartridge - however, I would guess that the Fortran ASM might well be the same as the PASCAL version - who knows...

Does anyone have any more information / copies of any of this?

OK, looking through the QL Owners Handbook for this, I can see I am missing some microdrive cartridges:

From the UCSD Pascal:
- PMISC

From the UCSD Fortran
- FBOOT

The P-System SOURCES (Driver Sources) cartridge is part of the Advanced Development Toolkit...

Rich,

as UCSD Pascal used to be conceptually the same thing as Java is today (an implementation of a programming system on a virtualized machine with platform-independent binaries and file system) it should theoretically be possible to re-construct the missing material from the platform-independent sources (as long as the QL virtual machine is intact and of the right version).

There is a lot of information around on UCSD-Pascal (the sources are free today) that could be used by someone interested to rebuild everything.

One place to start could be http://pascal.hansotten.com/index.php?page=more-files

Regards,
Tobias

tofro wrote:UCSD Pascal used to be conceptually the same thing as Java is today (an implementation of a programming system on a virtualized machine with platform-independent binaries and file system)

According to my present knowledges, the p-code should be the 8080 machine code.

dex wrote: According to my present knowledges, the p-code should be the 8080 machine code.

Dex,
actually it isn't - It's a stack-based machine without any significant registers (except PC, stack and some stack frame pointer registers). Very Close to Forth in some aspects.

This one http://ucsd-psystem-fs.sourceforge.net/
might probably be of interest - It allows mounting a p-System disk Image on Linux. Would be interesting to know if that works with the TDI Image files......

Tobias

I managed to salvage most of these microdrive cartridges, but I am sill missing some physical cartridges:
PASCAL ASM (I assume this is probably the same as the Fortran version)
PASCAL PMISC

As for reading the programs - I am still missing quite a lot as the cartridges were mainly unreadable.