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).
Simlar language, compatible with MSDOS, CP/M and Unix:
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!
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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Another blast from the past with these machines. Nice post!
Wait, you had working inline assembly in the old Turbo Pascal 3.0? I never knew.
Absolutely! Very powerful and fun when used to do some 320x200x256 mode graphics!
https://marktheunissen.com/posts/tech/2006-06-03-denthor-of-...
This was not supported in 3.0. You could however include inline machine code, pre-assembled elsewhere or by hand.
"Denthor? Now THAT's a name I've not heard in a long time..."
Man. It's kind of crazy to think that I, a Finnish 13-year-old, was reading these ASCII tutorials written by someone in South Africa in those pre-WWW days.
The good content just somehow spread across the globe. People copied these files on floppy disks and uploaded them to BBS's on 2400 bps modems, and after a few months they had been around the world.
The inefficient and expensive distribution was actually a powerful filter for content quality. Today any stupid disinformational shit goes viral around the world in two minutes.
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...
I have a small collection of "curated" CP/M software, which works alongside a CP/M emulator I wrote:
https://github.com/skx/cpm-dist
The distribution of Borland's Turbo Pascal v3.01A is approximately 180k.
Aztec-C on the Apple II had a vi editor that ran on a 64K machine, but you had to exit it before you could run the compiler.