You used Apple Pascal on the Apple II, not the Mac, and it wasn’t actually free but a couple hundred dollars a seat. It was based on UCSD Pascal, as were many implementations at the time, but it was a commercial product and one used by many Apple II developers. Your school either licensed or pirated it for you to use.
Apple didn’t even ship self-hosted assembly tools for the Mac until the Macintosh Development System later in 1984, and when Apple did ship Macintosh Pascal it was a learning environment with a (non-UCSD) bytecode interpreter rather than a native compiler with Toolbox access. That was still something most people used a Lisa for until after both the Mac 512 and the HD20 came out.
I definitely used ucsd pascal version II (not apple pascal, which came a bit later) on Apple II. Looking at this source[1], it looks like it both existed for Apple II and wasn't free so I must have assumed that incorrectly.
I also realise I was talking about Apple II not mac. My assumption/point was that the market for apple pascal devs had been captured previously by the "power" of the UCSD p-system before the mac came along so borland figured they didn't have a chance.
Personally I wasn't that much of a fan of ucsd pascal vs turbo pascal for reasons I can't remotely remember. I think ucsd pascal you could only do things in the "p-system" bytecode thing which meant it had a slightly more restrictive/pure pascal variant vs turbo pascal had some language extensions like being able to do dynamic memory allocation so you could make trees and linked lists and stuff that iirc you could'nt do very easily in vanilla/ucsd pascal. It's been a while so I may be misremembering.
Borland would definitely have had a chance with Turbo Pascal on the Apple II (if there had actually been a 6502 version available), for a couple of reasons:
- Speed
- Size
Speed: I used Apple Pascal as well as Turbo Pascal for the same purposes (steering satellite dishes, and also multi-tasking data collection) on dual-CPU Apple II clones (6502, z80). Using Turbo Pascal was a different world w.r.t. speed - way, way faster.
Size: When I developed my multi-tasking data collection system in Apple Pascal I had to use four floppy disk drives, set up for "swapping" (the UCSD/Apple Pascal system had that ability, it could segment itself) simply so that there would be a tiny bit of RAM available for the Apple Pascal editor. No such problem when using Turbo Pascal on the z80 system, with equal amounts of RAM.
When that's said, UCSD Pascal and Turbo Pascal weren't that dissimilar as far as Pascals were concerned - Wirth's Pascal wasn't very practical, so every useful Pascal version had their own extensions. UCSD and Turbo had some commonality there which made it easy to port between them.
IIRC the Wizardry games were all written in UCSD Pascal. I wouldn’t be surprised if a Mac port existed, it got ported to damn near every platform out there.
Apple didn’t even ship self-hosted assembly tools for the Mac until the Macintosh Development System later in 1984, and when Apple did ship Macintosh Pascal it was a learning environment with a (non-UCSD) bytecode interpreter rather than a native compiler with Toolbox access. That was still something most people used a Lisa for until after both the Mac 512 and the HD20 came out.