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Comments (41)

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  nlehuen
  I purchased Turbo Pascal 3 for Amstrad CPC 6128 with my pocket money back in 1989(?). That was 1000 FF back then (~275€ today) so quite a big sum for a teenager. My dad took pity on me and funded 50% of it. Best investment ever!Learning Pascal after Locomotive Basic was night and day. And the speeeeeed! I could finally compute 320x200 Mandelbrot set renderings in reasonable amounts of time (few minutes IIRC).I still have the disk & manual somewhere, as well as a couple related books. And for whatever reason Ctrl-K Ctrl-W still haunts my mind.It's really mind boggling that the entire thing (CP/M + IDE + compiler + libraries) fit on one side of a 3" floppy disk (<180 kB).
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  wowczarek
  Small machines eh?How about a Casio PB-2000C, in all its pocketable 910 kHz glory, up to 64k RAM shared between heap, stack, code and RAM filesystem. 192 x 32 LCD and a piezo buzzer. Serial and parallel ports available and a FDD. It also has a ROM card slot. And a card was developed, the only third-party ROM for this platform, by one Hans Larsson in Sweden, in the late 1980s.A 64k ROM with:- a mostly TP 5.5 compatible Pascal compiler, crt and friends- inline assembly- units, loadable libraries and all- debugger- full-screen editor, global search and replace, etc.- visual file manager- CLI with redirection and rudimentary shell scripting - variables, conditionals, argumentsWhile the hardware platform is somewhat available and there is a very good emulator, due to "issues", the DL-Pascal ROM is not at this time publicly available and only a chosen few have access to it. Luckily there is a preservation effort underway.
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  jshaqaw
  Pascal will always have my heart. My first bridge outside Basic (I was stuck with a home pc so didn’t go down the assembly rabbit hole like others of my generation). Turbo Pascal’s IDE. Add it possible for a kid to learn and create in a way I never would have done if stuck with a collection of semi independent tools. for those who say just use the command line - this was 1989. DOS was not exactly today’s modern shell environment!
• bluedino
  I had Turbo Pascal 2.0, back screen with yellow letters on DOS, didn't get the blue Borland IDE until a few years later, and I also had Microsoft QuickPascal. Wasn't 100% compatible with the games/graphics "tutes" of the time though.But, I ended up switching to Turbo C for the 'cool' factor, but in reality TP was a better way to go about what I was using it for.
• yitchelle
  Turbo Pascal's IDE was my first glimpse into debugging beyond strategically place print statements. It was a game changer. Imagine single stepping through your code and inspecting your variables!
• anthk
  Simlar language, compatible with MSDOS, CP/M and Unix:https://t3x.org/t3x/0/index.html
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  SoftTalker
  Is it right to say that Borland basically invented the IDE? I didn't use Turbo Pascal but did have a copy of Turbo C back in the day and that was certainly the first IDE-like programming environment I can remember.
• relwin
  I just dug up TP v3.01 from 1983. Not sure I have a working 5-1/4 floppy drive to tell if the disk is any good... Programming with TP brings back fun times!
• pjmlp
  I guess today is Pascal's day.This website is full of goodies for anyone that cares about history of Niklaus Wirth created languages.
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  jgord
  Turbo Pascal is such an iconic and beloved product, they need to make a movie about it.
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  iberator
  Early versions (3?) could fit an amazing editor, assembler, compiler, debugger and whole IDE in just 120kb(!!!) of disk space.Vim looks pathetic in comparison to it...
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  spwa4
  Wait, you had working inline assembly in the old Turbo Pascal 3.0? I never knew.
• aghuang
  Another blast from the past with these machines. Nice post!
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  timonoko
  I wrote Pascal for 8080 in 1976 and Finnish Army even paid some money for it.I was truly disappointed that Turbo Pascal did not copy my handy PORT-metavariable. You can write & read IO-ports without any extra hässle:https://photos.app.goo.gl/qeJpYb94XzLBCE139
• Alephinitesimal
  [dead]
• Pawel_SkimmIQ
  [dead]
• anon
  undefined
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  pkphilip
  I wish someone will just use Claude Code and generate an equivalent of Delphi 7 for Linux, MacOSX and Windows.