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nlehuen 8 hours ago [-]
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).
forinti 5 hours ago [-]
I just looked up the price for Acornsoft ISO Pascal in 1989 and found a listing with 69 pounds, which would be 188 2026 pounds or 220 euros. It consists of 2 16KB ROMs (and a floppy version).
jshaqaw 3 days ago [-]
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!
bananaboy 6 hours ago [-]
Same here! Very fond memories. I used Turbo Pascal 3.3 under CP/M on the Microbee but found it a bit hard and cumbersome to use. But when I discovered TP5 on MS-DOS I was blown away! This was coming from writing BASIC and batch files.
wowczarek 6 hours ago [-]
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.
RodgerTheGreat 4 hours ago [-]
Sounds fascinating. Is there anywhere we can read more about this preservation effort? Does the PB-2000C have an active user community today?
pkphilip 12 minutes ago [-]
I wish someone will just use Claude Code and generate an equivalent of Delphi 7 for Linux, MacOSX and Windows.
anthk 2 days ago [-]
Simlar language, compatible with MSDOS, CP/M and Unix:
Turbo Pascal is such an iconic and beloved product, they need to make a movie about it.
jasonfarnon 10 minutes ago [-]
I dont know about TP specifically but I could see a Borland movie. It's weird remembering them as a legit msft competitor. But yeah, enough time has passed oral histories should be around.
pjmlp 3 days ago [-]
I guess today is Pascal's day.
This website is full of goodies for anyone that cares about history of Niklaus Wirth created languages.
iberator 2 days ago [-]
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...
stevekemp 7 hours ago [-]
I have a small collection of "curated" CP/M software, which works alongside a CP/M emulator I wrote:
"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.
moosedev 4 hours ago [-]
I read those tutorials as well! Around the same age, in '96 or '97, when I first got online, in the UK. And it might have been someone's "translation" of them into C, although I do recall reading the Pascal originals as well.
Namedropping another contemporary reference, I probably downloaded them from the Hornet Archive or a mirror.
They were a major step along the short but satisfying road to my first 3D starfield using Borland C++ (acquired via a magazine coverdisc). I felt so l33t.
bananaboy 6 hours ago [-]
I read the denthor tutorials back in the day! So good! I think I used to get them via email on a bbs that had an internet gateway. It was all very clunky, just a terminal account, I think it didn’t even have slirp
yardshop 4 hours ago [-]
I think I got that tutorial through either Compuserve, or Usenet via Delphi the information service (years before Borland Delphi). My early stepping stones to the internet!
rzzzt 6 hours ago [-]
Friendly reminder that PC-GPE is still online!
bananaboy 6 hours ago [-]
Years ago I worked with Mark Feldman who put together PC-GPE! I did a bit of a double take and fanboyed a bit when he started because I had spent so much time reading it.
andrewshadura 7 hours ago [-]
This was not supported in 3.0. You could however include inline machine code, pre-assembled elsewhere or by hand.
yardshop 4 hours ago [-]
Thanks for the correction. I must have been on TP5 at that point and lost track of the distinction over the years.
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).
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.
https://t3x.org/t3x/0/index.html
This website is full of goodies for anyone that cares about history of Niklaus Wirth created languages.
Vim looks pathetic in comparison to it...
https://github.com/skx/cpm-dist
The distribution of Borland's Turbo Pascal v3.01A is approximately 180k.
https://marktheunissen.com/posts/tech/2006-06-03-denthor-of-...
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.
Namedropping another contemporary reference, I probably downloaded them from the Hornet Archive or a mirror.
They were a major step along the short but satisfying road to my first 3D starfield using Borland C++ (acquired via a magazine coverdisc). I felt so l33t.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Assembler