Pascal MicroEngine
The Pascal MicroEngine was a series of products manufactured by Western Digital in the early to mid 1980s, designed specifically to efficiently run the UCSD p-System. Whereas other microcomputers ran a machine-language p-code interpreter, the Pascal Microengine had its interpreter implemented in microcode, so p-code was effectively its native machine language.
As usual on the p-System, the most common programming language used was Pascal, though BASIC, Fortran, and other languages were available.
The MicroEngine ran a special release III p-System, which was not used on any other platforms. However, the enhancements of release III were incorporated into release IV which was made available for other platforms but not for the MicroEngine.
The MicroEngine series of products was offered at various levels of integration:
- WD90 chip set
- WD900 board
- WD9000 packaged system
- Modular MicroEngine board set
The MicroEngine chipset was based on the MCP1600 chipset which formed the basis of the DEC LSI-11 low-end minicomputer and the WD16 processor used by AlphaMicro.
The MicroEngine was only modestly successful; its performance advantage was quickly eroded by the increasing popularity of mainstream 16-bit microprocessors such as the Intel 8086 and Motorola 68000, and by the availability of p-code to native machine code translators.
One example of a commercial product based on the MicroEngine was the AVAB Viking lighting control system, which used the Modular MicroEngine boards along with some custom hardware.