{"id":32469,"date":"2023-12-03T00:01:39","date_gmt":"2023-12-02T23:01:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/159.69.82.204\/win\/?p=32469"},"modified":"2023-12-02T00:22:36","modified_gmt":"2023-12-01T23:22:36","slug":"40-years-of-turbo-pascal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/borncity.com\/win\/2023\/12\/03\/40-years-of-turbo-pascal\/","title":{"rendered":"40 years of Turbo Pascal"},"content":{"rendered":"

[German<\/a>]I recently recognized that the Turbo Pascal development environment was introduced by Borland 40 years ago. But it completely passed me by. I myself only came into contact with Turbo Pascal around 1987\/1988. Today, a brief look back for the somewhat older blog readers.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"It was November 1983 when an unknown company called Borland<\/a>, founded by Philippe Kahn<\/a>, a French math teacher who had immigrated to the USA, launched a product called \"Turbo Pascal<\/a>\". The 40th anniversary would have passed me by if I hadn't come across the following tweet on Friday, which picks up on this.<\/p>\n

\"40<\/a><\/p>\n

Turbo Pascal was an integrated development environment for the Pascal language. According to Wikipedia<\/a>, the compiler was based on the Blue Label Software Pascal Compiler. This was originally developed by Anders Hejlsberg<\/a> for the NAS-SYS cassette-based operating system of the Nascom microcomputer. This compiler was first further developed as the Compas Pascal compiler for the CP\/M operating system and then as the Turbo Pascal compiler for MS-DOS and CP\/M.<\/p>\n

The actual start of Turbo Pascal completely passed me by. I was working with one of the first IBM PC\/XT machines, that has been shipped with IBM-DOS 1.x to Europe. Later we got IBM-DOS 2.x, might be around 1984. There was also CP\/M 86 for the machine – and a UCSD Pascal was included – but I never used it. At that time, an application had to be created in dBASE II – I had inherited it from a colleague who had resigned suddenly.<\/p>\n

But I did end up working with Pascal and specifically Turbo Pascal. I had already touched on it in the article\u00a0It's done: 30 years as a freelance writer \u2026<\/a>\u00a0As a guest student at the University of Hagen in the mid-1980s, I studied mathematics and computer science alongside my work, I also took Pascal. But it was pointless, as it all had to be done as a \"dry run\" – we didn't have any computers.<\/p>\n

At work, I programmed A86 assembler, FORTAN and PL\/M for Intel real time microprocessor systems and dBase II for IBM PCs. In 1981, I had access to the computer lab at the University of Bremen for two hours – a former fellow student from my university of applied sciences continued to study there and gave me access – but it wasn't that great either – and in the same year I left my employer in Bremen.<\/p>\n

By, by, Pascal? At some point, I wanted to learn Pascal properly and around 1987, that became a reality. It was an absolute rush, but it was a success. I borrowed an IBM PC from my employer over a public holiday with a long weekend and organized a Turbo Pascal compiler for it. Then I ported the 8080 disassembler, which I had written on an Amstrad ZX 81, from Basic to Pascal. It worked as part of the weekend project, and after that I was able to work with Turbo Pascal.<\/p>\n

Later, when I had bought my own Amstrad PC with MS-DOS, I had the idea of turning the \"Disassembler\" project into an article and selling it to a German computer magazine. I even made some real money (about 2,000 Deutsche Mark at that time, raw about 1,000 US Dollar). And because I wanted to get rich and famous quickly, I started writing books – initially about BASIC. But there is also a Turbo Pascal 5.0 title from 1998 in my book shelf.<\/p>\n

However, I never personally did much with Turbo Pascal and when I switched to Windows, I also stopped programming. There was only a kind of \"relapse\" in the 90s when I wrote a booklet on the Visual Basic .NET compiler for Microsoft's .NET environment. This was later followed by titles on Net with the VB and C# languages, but nothing more on Pascal or Turbo Pascal. Turbo Pascal probably stopped at version 7.01 in 1993 – I never got involved with Delphi. It's been a long time. Does anyone from the readership have memories of that time?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[German]I recently recognized that the Turbo Pascal development environment was introduced by Borland 40 years ago. But it completely passed me by. I myself only came into contact with Turbo Pascal around 1987\/1988. Today, a brief look back for the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1319,1547],"tags":[54,1544],"class_list":["post-32469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-software","tag-general","tag-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/borncity.com\/win\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/borncity.com\/win\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/borncity.com\/win\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/borncity.com\/win\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/borncity.com\/win\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32469"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/borncity.com\/win\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32469\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/borncity.com\/win\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/borncity.com\/win\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/borncity.com\/win\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}