161–170 of 271 posts
Wrote a couple of interesting things a few years later in TP 5.5, including a BBS/Kom system and a MUD (with 4 dial-in lines).
Found the source a few years back, was an interesting read a few decades later.
Turbo Pascal is what got me into programming. I remember spending hundreds of German marks on a license for Borland Pascal 7.0 and later Delphi 1.0 and 2.0. I ended up developing my first “commercial” software that I sold for money. In the DOS era, Turbo Pascal was probably the easiest way to get into programming, outside of Basic. And on Windows 3.1/95, Delphi was eye-opening how easy GUI programming could be. In ma…
That's because the "fully featured" of the 90s would be barely usable today. Or to rephrase: the frameworks and programs of today are not "similarly powerful" to the ones from the mid 90s, even if you just recompiled the app from 25 years ago with the current version of your framework (theoretically ;), it would gain support for unicode (codepages where just...), internationalization, accessability, support for networks (who still knows Novell?),... . Except for SAP, they somehow succeeded at combining the user-hostileness of the 90's UIs with the resource consumption of contemporary programs ;).
Turbo Pascal had been the language I used after BASIC, with which I started.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Processing (P5) had this: you can select any string of text in its IDE anl search for it in the docs, and if it's one of the built-in functions or constants it will open the associated static html page that came installed with the software, so no internet nor server required. And despite being offline you can still navigate the docs too. This feels a lost basic skill in static site generation these days. It was the o…
You speak in past tense but isn’t Processing still in use? I distinctly remember using it to program my Arduino just five years ago.
The main thing I recall about TP was that it came with simple, easy to understand code examples for every function that were organized logically and easy to find and use. So as a teenager who barely understood basic I could teach myself TP without the internet, just using the IDE. So many modern systems do not have anything even close to this. I wonder if its inherent in the nature of the simpler x86 DOS based system…
I also learned Turbo Pascal without any books (I had a Basic book, because that came with the computer). But it was way easier. Drawing pixels was as easy as just selecting your (double buffered!) display mode and, well drawing pixels. Same with the reading of e.g. the joystick port or the mouse, you'd just read it.
Ok with a bunch of old hats here, anyone else remember Technojock's Turbo Toolkit? It was a UI and eventually object toolkit for Pascal apps and it was pretty damn cool for the time. There isn't much online about it, but everyone I knew who was working in TP or BP swore by this in the early 90s.. https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10277966...
My experience with Pascal was my first experience with a procedural language. Before that I had been writing BASIC. I didn't believe at first that I wouldn't need a goto statement somewhere. I recall later thinking that compared to BASIC, the resulting code was more satisfying looking. In highschool we used the Watcom compiler running on QNX on a 286. It was slower to compile I remember than my later experience with Turbo C.
Later on me and a bunch of friends programmed a Sokoban-clone called “Project S” for MS-DOS: it used the graphics mode “X” for smooth scrolling; we even bought a commercial .mod player library for the sound effects and background music.
It's hard to overstate just how much faster Turbo Pascal was than its competitors. So fast that it was hard to believe it wasn't cheating in some way. And then the resulting program was faster too. A tour-de-force of its day, and it deserved all the acclimation that it got.
It's biggest downside was that it was limited to producing 64KB .COM files until version 4 or 5.
I know I've used it on CP/M first.
It was really, really fast.
Turbo Pascal is what got me into programming. I remember spending hundreds of German marks on a license for Borland Pascal 7.0 and later Delphi 1.0 and 2.0. I ended up developing my first “commercial” software that I sold for money. In the DOS era, Turbo Pascal was probably the easiest way to get into programming, outside of Basic. And on Windows 3.1/95, Delphi was eye-opening how easy GUI programming could be. In ma…
There was at least one elephant missing in that executable - Unicode support. It would not fit into PC RAM back then probably.
On fitting in RAM's, in depends. From 1993 to 1998 the changes where huge.
looking at the perfection of Turbo pascal always made me feel stupid. At least it's not just me, wikipedia says: "Scott MacGregor of Microsoft said that Bill Gates "couldn't understand why our stuff was so slow" compared to Turbo Pascal. "He would bring in poor Greg Whitten [programming director of Microsoft languages] and yell at him for half an hour" because their company was unable to defeat Kahn's small startup,…
It did everything possible in memory, avoiding reading and writing of temporary files. Microsoft tools did it with the file I/O for multiple passes, a traditional solution for coping with limited RAM and applying optimization steps and targeting different processors.