At sometime around 1976 Pascal was The Language of the Future. There was some project to program an OS with Pascal in Helsinki, possibly the Russian MIR-computer. Anyways I heard a heated discussion where they wanted money for "tens of man-years". Very annoying, so I wrote Pascal-compiler for 8080 just like that in few months. It was little restricted but quite usable. Then Very Strange Thing happened: the Finnish Army wanted it, maybe because it was not hampered by American Comecon-embargo and better than nothing (or assembler). I was ordered to write a short manual and forget all about it. Not a big deal, it was just a demo, and I was already interested in some other things.
That's an interesting anecdote - so did the Finnish army actually use your Pascal compiler? And when you say you were ordered to write a manual for it, where you in the Finnish army at that time?
I was in the University Telecom Lab, but employed by the army in a project to specify a portable texting device, which eventually become the well-known Finnish Army "Kyber"-radiotermimal. I specified the operating system of this non-existing device in my own nokoPascal.
This was the time I was playing with my symbolic stack machine, a Forth of sort, but wierd metacharacters which allowed direct execution of "(+ 1 2)" which eventually become Nokolisp. Not a big thing at all -- I just made a Pascal-compiler to this metamachine. http://timonoko.github.io/Nokolisp.htm
Oh yes now I remembered it all. I went to army right after that. But I was a Hippie at the time and concious objector of sort. The inquisition panel found out my objection was not "real" so I ended up as Army Radio Man. But I learned to morse very badly, probably because of mild dyslexia. So rest of the year I was making test equipment for a Russian Missile Control because of language skills ( https://flic.kr/p/JycyMy ). And just occasionally consulting the "Kyber"-team. I did not get any medals or ranks for my contribution, because untrustworthy Hippie with bad hairdo. Also I was rejected from army reserve duties, which was very good.
