I started with Turbo Pascal, and as is often noted by others, I spent a lot of time with the book Borland shipped with the compiler.
And Jeff Duntemann's outstanding "Complete Turbo Pascal".
I still have a (translated) copy of that book!
Turbo Pascal Turns 40
251–260 of 271 posts
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#252Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#253To quote Joel Spolsky: One day, a spiffy program called Compas Pascal appeared from Denmark, which Philippe Kahn bought and renamed Borland Turbo Pascal. Turbo Pascal was sort of shocking, since it basically did everything that IBM Pascal did, only it ran in about 33K of memory including the text editor. This was nothing short of astonishing. Even more astonishing was the fact that you could compile a small program i…
A 1-person company beating IBM & Microsoft really...
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#254There's one thing I don't understand. Whenever TP or Delphi get brought up, people wax nostalgic about how amazing they were, and that they are actually unmatched to this day in certain aspects. I know the adoption of both got hurt by Borland's and Embarcadero's corporate shenanigans. However, FreePascal and Lazarus are reportedly just as good as Borland's products, but without the business issues. Despite that, they…
FreePascal is pretty good but could be better with more manpower; Lazarus never was as good as Delphi GUI-wise, and hasn't been updated for modern GUI toolkits, so (unfortunately) it's almost obsolete by now.
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#255One of my favourite computer games was written in Turbo Pascal: ZZT, written by Tim Sweeney of Epic Megagames. It was a quircky text-mode game with puzzles, shooting, and so on. It had a built-in game editor that came even with the free shareware version, and it even had a little programming language called ZZT-OOP. ZZT's original source code was lost. Years later, Adrian Siekierka painstakingly reverse-engineered th…
ZZT is the reason I have Turbo Pascal on my computer.
ZZT is the reason I had Turbo Pascal on my computer too!
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#256Turbo Pascal is probably the key thing that led me to end up studying CS and becoming a software engineer. I had dabbled in Basic starting around 10, I took a summer camp coding class, which would have been pretty novel in the late 80s I guess. But then at some point we got a copy of Turbo Pascal (my Dad was an engineer and was always bringing interesting stuff home for me to try) and I started banging on that. In my…
When my dad found a box full of old floppies in the back of a drawer, I bought a USB floppy drive and was able to backup all the data in them: some of them contained my very first programs written in Turbo Pascal 3.0 and GW-BASIC.
USB floppy drives are quite cheap to buy, and in my case it was totally worth the money!
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah, the good old BBS days. I wrote a door library for Turbo Pascal back in '89 when I was 17 after I learned how to write an interrupt based serial driver, and then released it as shareware. It saw quite a bit of use until the mid-90's when the BBS scene fell off a cliff.
Inquiring minds need to know: what is a door library?
I think doors in BBS terms were essentially side-loaded programs that ran within the BBS framework. Different content, text games, that sort of thing. So the library would be something written to work within that specific BBS software.
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
Inquiring minds need to know: what is a door library?
I think doors in BBS terms were essentially side-loaded programs that ran within the BBS framework. Different content, text games, that sort of thing. So the library would be something written to work within that specific BBS software.
TIL. Thank you.
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's what I remember too. I briefly documented how to run Turbo Pascal 3.00A on a CP/M system a while back: https://github.com/skx/z80-playground-cpm-fat/blob/main/TURB... I'm doing that on a single-board Z80-based system, and it has to be said that writing pascal is a pleasure on such a machine. 64k of memory, and yet code compiles to real executables "instantly".
May I interest you in a game of Snake for that. https://github.com/linker3000/Z80-Board/blob/master/snake.pa...
I have a similar copy of a snake game already, and a tetris clone, but seeing more code is always fun - thanks for sharing :)
Re: Turbo Pascal Turns 40
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
~20. The Euro (or "Teuro", as it was often called in Germany at the time) was introduced in... Uh, 2000 or 2001, thereabouts.
Ok. I googled and it said ~1.9. I seem to remember it being the late 90s so that's my bad memory. Funny, we also call it t'euro in Yorkshire too!
It was 1st January 1999 (well sort of the banks didn't open until 3rd)
The conversion rate was taken at end of business on the day before and all DEM, FRF etc trades had to be converted over the next two days.