Thinking Back on ‘Turbo Pascal’ as It Turns 40
canopic jug writes:
Several sites are reporting on the 40th anniversary of Turbo Pascal.
At the vintage computing web blog, Byte Cellar:
November marked the 40th anniversary of Turbo Pascal, the first Integrated Development Environment (or IDE), which allowed a user to quickly and easily write a program in the Pascal programming language and see it compiled and linked - all in one go - with an executable dropped to disk at the end. Much simpler a process than the traditional model of programming in a text editor, using a compiler to convert the source into object code (often over several passes), and running a linker to integrate any required libraries, Turbo Pascal was friendly, fast, and cheap. Created by Anders Hejlsberg, the development package was released by Borland in November 1983 at a price of $49.99 for both CP/M and DOS-based systems.
Created by Niklaus Wirth in 1970, Pascal is a small and efficient procedural programming language that is easy to use and, thanks to its structured programming nature, was often employed as a language for learning programming concepts at a level higher than traditional, early BASIC. It is in this capacity that I had my first hands-on experiences with the language in an A.P. Computer Science class I took in high school during the late '80s. Here, at its 40th anniversary, I thought I would share some memories I have with Turbo Pascal.
- Thinking Back on 'Turbo Pascal' as It Turns 40
And over at The Register:
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.