ANTIC Interview 295 - Harry Stewart, Pilot and WSFN - a podcast by Randy Kindig, Kay Savetz, Brad Arnold

 

Harry Stewart was a contractor for Atari from August 1978 through October 1983. He contributed to the operating system design and the manuals for the Atari 400 and 800; created the Atari implementation of the WSFN language (which was released in the first Atari Program Exchange catalog, summer 1981). He worked on Atari's PILOT programming language and the unreleased sequel, Super PILOT (also known as Summer Camp PILOT.)

 

Harry saved an enormous amount of material: source code, memos, notes, and more. He scanned some of it, I scanned some of it, and it's online at the Internet Archive at the AtariAge forums. 

 

This interview took place on June 29, 2017.

 

"You debugged in your head. It wasn't sitting at the machine single-stepping and doing breakpoints. If you had a problem, you thought it out. Why is this happening? ... Working on the hardware only as necessary."

 

 

 

Atari PILOT II, source code, discussion

 

Atari PILOT: source code, discussion, Internal Specification, External Specification 

 

Extended WSFN manual, and draft version. Source code, discussion