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).
show comments
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, arguments
While 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.
show comments
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!
show comments
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.
show comments
anthk
Simlar language, compatible with MSDOS, CP/M and Unix:
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.
jgord
Turbo Pascal is such an iconic and beloved product, they need to make a movie about it.
show comments
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...
show comments
spwa4
Wait, you had working inline assembly in the old Turbo Pascal 3.0? I never knew.
show comments
aghuang
Another blast from the past with these machines. Nice post!
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:
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).
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, arguments
While 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.
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!
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.
Simlar language, compatible with MSDOS, CP/M and Unix:
https://t3x.org/t3x/0/index.html
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!
I guess today is Pascal's day.
This website is full of goodies for anyone that cares about history of Niklaus Wirth created languages.
Turbo Pascal is such an iconic and beloved product, they need to make a movie about it.
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...
Wait, you had working inline assembly in the old Turbo Pascal 3.0? I never knew.
Another blast from the past with these machines. Nice post!
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
I wish someone will just use Claude Code and generate an equivalent of Delphi 7 for Linux, MacOSX and Windows.