Classic Macintosh
Classic Macintosh refers to the original m68k processor based Macintosh computer line from Apple Computers, Inc. The Macintosh was introduced in 1984, and its m68k-based successors was discontinued in 1995. The most powerful of the line was the Quadra series, with a clock speed of 33 MHz., and was expandable to 256 MB of RAM. The latest version of the Macintosh OS supported by the classic Macintosh was Mac OS 8.1.
Pascal was the implementation language of choice for the Macintosh. The first applications for the Macintosh were compiled on the Apple Lisa, until a Pascal compiler became available on the Macintosh. Early compilers for the Macintosh included Macintosh Pascal and MPW. THINK Pascal, introduced in 1986 as Lightspeed Pascal, quickly became the most popular Pascal compiler for the Macintosh, and was used by Richard Dawkins to develop his Blind Watchmaker series of computer programs.
With the advent of PowerPC based Macintoshes, Apple revised the standard Pascal library in favor of the Universal Pascal Interfaces (UPI), and introduced a new set of library calls called Carbon, the next-generation API for Macintosh programming. Carbon was to become the programming library for Mac OS X. The Pascal compiler and IDE CodeWarrior was the first to support UPI and Carbon, and quickly supplanted THINK Pascal as the IDE of choice for Macintosh development. It is possible to produce source that will compile for both m86k (under THINK Pascal) and for the PowerPC (under CodeWarrior) with the use of conditional compilation directives.
The flavor of Pascal supported by THINK Pascal (though not its object oriented syntax) is supported by Free Pascal in its MACPAS mode.
Basilisk II is a free-open source emulator for the Classic Macintosh platform, and is used for development in the original build and execution environment for Blind Watchmaker.