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Turbo Pascal Turns 40

blog.marcocantu.com

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Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#151

Post by hankman86 »

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 many ways, I feel like we have gone backwards from there. How was it possible for the Turbo Pascal / Delphi compiler to produce a small binary for a fully-featured GUI program when today similarly powerful software is orders of magnitude larger in size?

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#152

Post by hankman86 »

compiler-guy wrote: post #76

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.

Exactly, on the slow processors of the day, the Turbo Pascal compiler absolutely sprinted through the code.

A far cry from today’s complex build systems that take forever to compile a program which can do exactly the same thing.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#153

Post by actionfromafar »

usrusr wrote: post #150
deepspace wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pirated Turbo Pascal back in the day because I was a poor student in a Third World country and there was no way I could afford it. Ditto Turbo C. After I started working, I had a hand in selecting Borland C++ as our in-house development platform, and we paid Borland a fortune in licensing fees. Which would have gone to Intel or another company if it were not for my, and other folks in my cohort's experience with pi…

The lesson is that piracy (and to an only slightly lesser extent, free student licences) was an extremely powerful tool to keep a tool market cornered: impossible to compete on price when piracy is so ubiquitous that payment is essentially opt-in. (I had a mouse driver disc, 5.25, that wasn't pirated, it felt like something from a parallel universe with its machine-printed label)

A deliberate strategy by some companies. (Microsoft comes to mind.(

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#154

Post by rf15 »

Turbo Pacal! It's been ages, but it's the first language I learned. The Borland IDE was amazing for its time and allowed me to learn the language in no time. My dad learned it too, and even developed some small games with it. Even now he likes to use its successor, Delphi.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#155

Post by ivan_gammel »

hankman86 wrote: post #151

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.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#156

Post by hulitu »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #114

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,…

> "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"

They tried this on a project at my workplace. After six months of money spent on "yelling", they finally started to fix the issues.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#157

Post by omgmajk »

deepspace wrote: post #127
thsksbd wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I owe Borland a lot." A belated license to be exact :P

I pirated Turbo Pascal back in the day because I was a poor student in a Third World country and there was no way I could afford it. Ditto Turbo C. After I started working, I had a hand in selecting Borland C++ as our in-house development platform, and we paid Borland a fortune in licensing fees. Which would have gone to Intel or another company if it were not for my, and other folks in my cohort's experience with pi…

I really wonder when all this changed. I seem to have this idea, that I share with many others that software houses back in the day explicitly didn't care much about piracy because it got people hooked on their software and in the end enterprise would foot the bill.

I'm not sure how true this was, as I've yet to see any real official sources speaking about this myself but it seems like it was like that. But most of my thoughts about this comes from being in the piracy space back in the days so I really have no idea if this was ever a real thing or not.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#158

Post by edu »

enraged_camel wrote: post #139
vanderZwan wrote: post #118

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.

Yes, it's in use and well alive. The latest release, 4.3, is from July 26, 2023.

Although I think that p5.js is growing faster, as it's more accessible (browser IDE, not typed) and the artworks are easier to distribute online.

Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40

#160

Post by adamwiggins »

I'll join the chorus here and say that Turbo Pascal was my stepping stone from beginner tinkering (BASIC on Apple II and DOS) to professional development with C. The dev environment was the perfect mix of "serious and you can make real stuff including compiled executables for distribution" with approachability for a relative beginner.
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