Ah, memories of my ill spent youth. Back around 1977 I was still a physics major wasting too much time on the math departments computers at UC Riverside, and then this computer lab of Teraks shows up. Pardon my aging memory and bias, but the "deal" as I remember it was that UC San Diego, and UC Riverside were to "co-develope" Pascal on the Teraks. Obviously the deal broke, and in more ways than one. UCSD never let go of the source code so that UCR could do much of anything, but I did make a few trips down to pick up current versions which we "tested" running various student applications. I wrote a few programs, and mostly played around with "optimizing" the code in a couple of UCSD programs like Tank Battle. The Terak muscle and bit mapped graphics worked very well with Pascal, but the end result was a machine that nobody was buying outside academia (that I knew of). Next thing you know the professor from UCSD and one of his students (Roger Sumner I think) had ported the Pascal to the Apple II, and despite the original Pascal being done at UCSD, and IMHO by a LOT of student work, they set up a business with the "new" product. You had to have a Language Card to run it, and it took 2 floppy discs, a boot disc and a runtime/program disc. This was murder on a single floppy Apple II, but not bad if you had a A80 floppy drive or a pair of drives, and downright friendly once you had a hard drive or larger capacity (2 floppies left little space for any application). I have a bunch of books, discs, etc for the Apple II, and I "may" still have UCSD Pascal on some 8" Terak floppies. Pascal was the language of choice for Mac work for a number of years, then C and C+ etc. kind of dropped on everybody. Messy at first as all the header files were setup as calls to Pascal programs in the early Mac software developer stuff. IIRC it was AlSoft that had a program/patch etc. that allowed MIDI support on a Mac that was all in Pascal. I talked my wife into reworking the headers for use with C programs, and sent it back to AlSoft and they used it, but I never heard anything back from them about it. Really POed me at the time.

Very often a LOT of learning occurs when you trip over a crack in the system. Chances are good I would have remained a serious happy physics major, except for one lab report. During my 2nd year we had a lab on ballistics, that included shooting a 22 rifle into a pendelum. Many many measurements, followed by grinding the numbers through a couple stages of equations, then plotting the results a couple different ways. Hours of work, and having just learned Fortran, I was punching cards for the IBM 1130 before even thinking of poking with a calculator. It did take me awhile, but the end result was the whole report printed out fairly nicely, with graphs etc. When I handed it in a couple days late I expected to get into some trouble, but the Graduate student in charge of the lab accepted it like stone tablets. "How did you do this?, did you type all this?" Every student in lab had unique data, so to correct each paper he was spending like 3 hours doing all the calculations, and only had about 3 done out of 60+ students. My program reduced that to about 5 minutes of data entry, and maybe another 10 minutes of comparing the final reports. In return for giving him the program, which continued to be used for some time after I left, I got his account ID and password to use the .... HP3000. By a week later I stopped seeing sunlight for a quarter or so, spending my time in dark rooms with tektronics vector display terminals. Once hooked, there was no going back.