Wish more people named Peter Sollich for what he did in the Pascal world…
Posted by jpluimers on 2015/12/02
A small video reference to the work that Peter Sollich did for the Pascal world is at around 38:20 in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btGj-PocjeU#t=2298
It is where Allen Bauer talks about his early years at Borland. He talks about a German guy there without naming him. It is Peter Sollich (he names them a few time in the newsgroups though).
Peter Sollich came from Germany where he had written a Turbo Pascal compatible compiler for the Atari ST (it used a m68k Motorola 68000 CPU which is a 32-bit processor on the internal side with a 16-bit wide data bus (transporting 16-bit words) on the outside using a 24-bit address (so it can address 16 mebibytes of memory) – hence ST for Sixteen/Thirtytwo).
Borland bought the source code which formed the base for the current 32-bit x86 compiler implementations of both Delphi and C++ Builder (they hired him as a contractor to do the port).
Rumour goes that Peter wrote many parts of the x86 code emitter on the flight from Europe to the USA.
Before the ST era there was already a CP/M Modula-2 compiler written by Peter Sollich and Martin Odersky which Borland bought even earlier and was turned into Turbo Modula-2.
For people interested, here are some links with ore details – where possible I saved them in the WayBack machine as sites tend to Ditch historically important information:
- Full text of “Happy Computer Magazine (Germany) (July 1988)”.
- A few more interesting links on Delphi, C# and CLR history (trip down memory lane; Peter Sollich) « The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff.
- Allen Bauer in Article 49397 Subject Re: Leaving Delphi on embarcadero.public.delphi.non-technical.
- Allen Bauer in Article 49214 Subject Re: Leaving Delphi on embarcadero.public.delphi.non-technical.
- Allen Bauer in Article 61934 Subject Re: More like Delphi BS [Edit] on embarcadero.public.delphi.non-technical.
- Free Modula-2 Pages: Home.
- The Origins of Scala.
- If Only Borland Had Stuck With Turbo Modula-2 For CP/M.
- CP/M Turbo Modula-2 – Google Groups.
- Mani Ramaswamy and Peter Sollich: Inside Compiler in the Cloud and MDIL | Going Deep | Channel 9.
- Delphi and LLVM: what is your take on this? « The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff.
–jeroen
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 
Charles said
The M68K has an 24-bit external address bus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_68000#Address_bus
jpluimers said
But does it have enough physical address pins? I think effectively it is still a 32/16 processor.
Charles said
The data bus is 16 bit (registers internal are 32 bit). The CPU is able to address more than 64K (16 bit). Both the Atari and Amiga both used the M68K and both had more than 64K RAM.
jpluimers said
I fixed the text. Hopefully it is more clear now.