[BBC-Micro] FS: Master 512 - New and Unused, Set of PANOS Discs and Manuals, New

[Daniel Alejandro Benavides D.]

Hi all:
according to the author Richard Cownie, he guess the acronym CAMEL might be "Compiler for Acorn Modula-2 Extended Language" though he is not sure 

About the project he says the original idea was an "... OS for
business computing, using write-once optical disks instead of magnetic,
with its own window system, its own transaction-based filesystem,
its own editor based on Interscript ..."

The project was led by Jim Mitchell of a several ex-Xerox PARC employees, 
"The guy who did most of the work on the compiler and language extensions was Mick Jordan. Mostly they took Modula-2 and were adding language features to support exceptions.  The Theology from Xerox-PARC was that exceptions were wonderful (though I've always hated them myself: and from what I've read it seems one of the biggest problems with Xerox Alto/Dorado machines was that software would regularly crash with ``uncaught exception´´)."
... "The other guy on the Modula-2+ compiler project was Trevor Morris, who went out from Cambridge to Palo Alto for a short trip ... "  ... "Other prominent people on ARX were Steve Glassman (window system), Carl Dellar (filesystem), Jon Gibbons (InterScript-based editor)."  

"And it was all supposed to run on a machine with 512KByte of DRAM." ... "The whole thing was being developed using Acorn hardware and software-fileservers based on 6502 processors, the Acorn EcoNet network, and personal machines using early ARM boards. And there was no sensible source code management.  The most useful thing I did was to write a program called "xfertree" which could sync up two file trees across the network with minimal file transfers: if you copied a whole source tree things weren't reliable enough to get it done." 
"And the whole thing was supposed to use Modula-2+, with heavy use
of exceptions ... but the compiler was being developed at the same time
and didn't have the exception features yet ..."

So it might that they had trouble in the compiler during development of ARX but from reference [3] I know that in 1988 Olivetti Research Center (who bought Acorn technologies) like is mentioned there they used to convert Modula-2+ to Modula-3 code using Emacs in the process.
I hope this helps towards getting some more information additionally, thanks also to Richard Cownie.

Thanks in advance

--- El dom, 12/12/10, Daniel Alejandro Benavides D. <dabenavidesd at yahoo.es> escribió:

> De: Daniel Alejandro Benavides D. <dabenavidesd at yahoo.es>
> Asunto: Re: FS: Master 512 - New and Unused, Set of PANOS Discs and Manuals, New
> Para: bbc-micro at lists.cloud9.co.uk
> Fecha: domingo, 12 de diciembre, 2010 17:41
> Hi all:
> respect of the set of boxes, anything can be brought to
> live again I guess, if there is some source of correction in
> the FS it was written, but unfourtunately, this is hard to
> know when it is about of huge files, like music, video, etc,
> the good thing is this only multimedia data, I'm sure you
> don't have so much info in your discs. I guess
> Interesting enough is this mail of past year:
> http://www.realworldtech.com/beta/forums/index.cfm?action=detail&id=103093&threadid=102990&roomid=2
> 
> About Acorn technology of those days, I wonder how they got
> the system around a Read only file system, perhaps they did
> believe everything could be networked or something like
> that, indeed, I had a Professor that said that all current
> OSS were File oriented, not what he taugth in my University
> were Computer Networks course indeed.
> 
> In behalf of them, there are some reports that talk about
> the computer they had and what they resolved theyir
> problems, specially [1] Modula-2 most related and [2]
> Modula-2+ which talk a bit more about the language and its
> closest descendant [3] Modula-3:
> 
> [1] P. Robinson and M. Jordan, “A programming environment
> for Modula-2,” Software Engineering Journal, vol. 3, no.
> 4, pp. 119-126, 1988.
> 
> [2] M. Jordan, “Experiences in configuration management
> for modula-2,” in Proceedings of the 2nd International
> Workshop on Software configuration management  -, pp.
> 126-128, 1989.
> 
> [3] M. Jordan, “An extensible programming environment for
> Modula-3,” in Proceedings of the fourth ACM SIGSOFT
> symposium on Software development environments  - SDE
> 4, pp. 66-76, 1990.
> 
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