[Way] back in 1983, Infoworld reviewed ThinkTank, my first outliner.
This review, along with the one in the NYT, launched the company. Early the next year we shipped our Macintosh product at the Mac rollout in Flint Center.
This review is amazing. But what the heck were they talking about with “the Pascal operating system”?
It was the UCSD P-system. Without it I would not have wanted to make Apple II software, nor would I have been able to build an app as rich as ThinkTank. UCSD was an orders of magnitude more memory-efficient than BASIC or assembly language. And it had overlays. Which meant if something didn’t have to be in memory all the time, it could be swapped in when needed. Most Apple IIs only had floppy drives in those days, so it was slow and a pain in the ass, but a lot faster than quitting the program, inserting another disk and launching another app just to edit the text of a headline. What I learned as a result of Gruber’s inquiry is that the P-system was one James Gosling’s inspirations for Java.