Fun fact: the original author of Turbo Pascal, Anders Hejlsberg, went on to lead development of C# and then later TypeScript.
Woah. Had no idea he was responsible for Turbo Pascal
Turbo Pascal Turns 40
81–90 of 271 posts
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#82When I was a kid, a kindly computer store owner (who also made me a great deal on an PC-semi-compatible running MS-DOS 1.25, for approx. a hundred lawns mowed and babies sat) sold me a copy of Turbo Pascal for generic MS-DOS (no PC BIOS assumed) on 8" floppy. He transferred it to the 160KB 5.25" format that my semi-compatible used. I hope I was appreciative enough at the time, as I am now. That helped bootstrap my ca…
Okay, I'll bite :) What's this "PC-semi-compatible" of which you speak?
Sanyo MBC-550 series. It later got MS-DOS 2.11.
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#83When I was a kid, a kindly computer store owner (who also made me a great deal on an PC-semi-compatible running MS-DOS 1.25, for approx. a hundred lawns mowed and babies sat) sold me a copy of Turbo Pascal for generic MS-DOS (no PC BIOS assumed) on 8" floppy. He transferred it to the 160KB 5.25" format that my semi-compatible used. I hope I was appreciative enough at the time, as I am now. That helped bootstrap my ca…
Okay, I'll bite :) What's this "PC-semi-compatible" of which you speak?
Back in the early days, MS-DOS was very much like CP/M in that there were several different 8088 machines. The “PC Compatible” hadn’t quite exploded yet, so MS-DOS (and CP/M 86) compatibility was enough.
But soon, Flight Simulator became the benchmark for compatibility, and I think the final nail was that Lotus 1-2-3 required an actual PC compatible machine. That plus the rise of clone BIOSs pretty much ended the brief era of generic, 8088, non-PC compatible machines, save for niche domains.
An interesting artifact of this era was when Steve Ciarcia of BYTE magazine released his 8088 board, and it was not PC compatible. He made some different design decisions.
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
My uni had two micros halls, one with 5.0, the other with 5.5. What's the difference? I asked. It turns out the 5.5 had some new shit called "Object Oriented Programming"... and a Breakout clone to illustrate the paradigm. At some moment Borland released, free as in beer, the 3 and 5 versions. Binaries should be out there somewhere for those curious. I'm sure young people would be surprised to see what 5.5 provided.…
Ha, thanks for refreshing my memory that it was 5.5 that added OOP! I started with 4.0, so that's my baseline. Then 5.0 added overlays (IIRC) and 6.0 introduced Turbo Vision, which was a kind of magic to me :). It's interesting how a _programming language/IDE_ can bring such warm feelings.
I remember I learned Turbo Vision and OOP in general by writing my own Turbo Vision equivalent for the graphics mode (vs. text-only). Good times!
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#85A-HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!
YOU ARE NEXT
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#86My first language in college was TP. It was such a nice environment to use that when I first encountered gcc and similar UNIX compilers I thought them to be very primitive.
TP was also the first language that I learned in collage in 84. I remember the Prof always calling it the language of love. We made fun of him alot for that statement but I think he got the last laugh...
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#87Still remember tinkering around the inline asm in TP6, taught me a lot about low level part of system.
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ha, thanks for refreshing my memory that it was 5.5 that added OOP! I started with 4.0, so that's my baseline. Then 5.0 added overlays (IIRC) and 6.0 introduced Turbo Vision, which was a kind of magic to me :). It's interesting how a _programming language/IDE_ can bring such warm feelings.
I remember I learned Turbo Vision and OOP in general by writing my own Turbo Vision equivalent for the graphics mode (vs. text-only). Good times!
That's very cool! IIRC I tried to write a very simple Turbo Vision clone (or subset) but I couldn't fully comprehend how the nested widget initialization worked. I mean, I knew the last parameter was a pointer to the next widget, and so on and on, but somehow I couldn't "integrate" everything in my brain :).
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#89The whole Borland suite was epic for the time. I still feel like Turbo Debugger was the peak of debugging UI