Apple's classic Pascal poster, remade as a vector image [pdf]

[alx__]

Some background on the poster

https://vintagecomputer.ca/the-history-of-apples-pascal-synt...

[shever73]

The comments on this article are even more interesting. The product manager for Apple Pascal has a copy of the poster signed by Niklaus Wirth.

[yreg]

There is also another link between Apple and the artist:

The Apple bite logo was designed by Rob Janoff at Regis McKenna's firm. McKenna says the out-of-order rainbow was inspired by the work of Bay Area commercial illustrator Tom Kamifuji.

[another2another]

>He got two of them autographed by Nicholas Wirth himself

The first comment on that article is pure historical gold - it would be great to get Niklaus Wirth's signature added to this too, if Taylor Pohlman could be convinced to supply a scan?

[znpy]

> Since Jobs did not understand Raskin’s color scheme, he had an artist alter the work, unfortunately, for the worst. Left side, rigid coloring. Right side, chaos.

Interesting to see another datapoint on how an awful asshole of a boss Jobs was.

[stanmancan]

https://web.archive.org/web/20240104203434/http://www.danama...

[dekhn]

The pascal system on Apple II was very advanced. I never used it (BASIC and 6502 assembly for me) but I know that one game I played, the well-regarded "Wizardry" (note the state-of-the art 3D graphics here https://www.denofgeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Wizardr... and here https://www.myabandonware.com/media/screenshots/w/wizardry-p...)

I believe a group has built source for Wizardry from the binary and you can compile/run it today on Apple emulators: https://www.zimlab.com/wizardry/proving-grounds-v3/

it's crazy how that game, with its simple 3D graphics, led me to be fascinated with rendering 3D which ended up being a significant part of my career.

[bdavbdav]

Dana’s tweets / posts are fantastic. Worth checking out the back catalogue

[danjc]

Site is hugged to death - do you have the Twitter handle?

[mistersquid]

Digging around

- http://www.danamania.com/605/

leads to

- https://quadra605.mcdonnelltech.com

Such nostalgia!

[whalesalad]

My first family computer was a Quadra 610 pizza box. Absolute dog.

[Jerry2]

Was this converted by hand or by using some vectorizer? Really impressive!

Anyway, are there any ML-powered vectorizers out there?

[nanoraptor]

Essentially all by hand. I'd tried to do it a few times before with different quality scans, and while I could see the original intent on all of them, auto-tracing never held up across the whole poster.

I ended up taking a few days zoning out and re-drawing it as a white/black raster image over a highly scaled up scan, then auto-traced that in Illustrator and coloured it there. Text went in as some variant of Century Gothic with a few changes to match the original.

[justinl33]

I think vector magic is the current state of the art: https://vectormagic.com/?=20

No one seems to have tried to leverage deep learning yet; either because they haven't thought of doing so, or it just wouldn't be worthwhile. image to SVG's are an inherently deterministic task, with not much room for the noisy error of most deep learning models like stable diffusion and such. I think algorithmic approaches are just better in this case - deep learning isn't always superior.

[murphyslab]

Parts of this definitely appear to have been traced, although I'm not sure if it was done manually or by a vectorizer.

Around the `OF` in the `FIELD LIST` flow, the green edge has the same perspective change as in the original, cf: https://www.attentionspan.nl/posts/technology/apple-pascal-s...

Lots of other little peculiarities of the original seem to be preserved. So it definitely wasn't re-made solely from reference.

[justinl33]

5 years ago... someone tried abusing a text generating RNN to produce broken SVG, and then tidy it up. Genuinely curious as to how this might work with today's transformers.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/cnip4m/p_a...

https://github.com/artBoffin/GAN-XML-Fixer

[kekub]

I had some good results with https://vectorizer.ai/

[tempodox]

There's the Railroad Diagram Generator:

https://github.com/GuntherRademacher/rr

[jhbadger]

I remember this poster -- this was a tie in to Apple Pascal on the Apple ][ (a port of the UCSD Pascal system)

[alwillis]

Oh yes—I remember it too.

I also remember using UCSD Pascal on a 64K Apple ][ with dual 5¼ floppy drives.

[chuckadams]

I wonder what the train-track diagram for C++ would look like...

[dleslie]

I'd imagine it would be a dozen pages, thereabouts. The BNF for C++ isn't as large as many people seem to think.

https://alx71hub.github.io/hcb/

[ofey404]

+1

[callalex]

I love me a good drop shadow but…hot diggity did late 80’s design pour on the honey there.

[tobr]

This is more of a groovy 70’s design to my eyes. (And yeah, it also says “©1979 APPLE COMPUTER INC” in the corner)

[nielsbot]

80s graphic design was wild (neon, random geometric shapes, air brush effect, grid lines)

Wonder if it will make a comeback.

[saagarjha]

Considering the source, is this a real poster, or…?

[joezydeco]

It's real. But yeah, I understand why you're asking.

[_giorgio_]

Is there anything similar for python and pytorch?

[adamsmith]

For Python's syntax: https://docs.python.org/3/library/ast.html

If you want examples of code → ast, googling for [python ast visualizer] turns up a few tools

[michelangelo]

This is absolutely gorgeous!