One distinct memory stands out. I could not wrap my mind around the Object-Oriented extensions on Pascal. I read, re-read, and re-re-read the section of the book describing what polymorhpism is and how it worked, probably at least a dozen times. Somehow it seemed really important and I kept coming back to it. I worked the examples. And then one day the ah-hah moment arrived. I remember it felt like a shock, why it was useful and what I could do with it. I promptly used my knowledge to write a new game using OOP principles to guide the rudimentary "characters" of various geometric shapes at the core of the game.

Fun times, and very formative to me!

And: "A Personal History of Compilation Speed, Part 2" https://prog21.dadgum.com/47.html

He offered three courses. CompSci 1 used Turbo Pascal and Delphi. CompSci 2 used C++ and Java. CompSci 3 used Microsoft Turbo Assembly and a language of the student’s choice.

We had to write our code and save them to floppy discs for submission since the lab systems had DeepFreeze installed on Win95, so any local storage wouldn’t persist.

I had played a lot with the Spectrum (a Sinclair zx spectrum 128k) and its BASIC interpreter but that was mostly copying from magazines and changing some parameters. And BASIC is weird :)

A few years later in school in the 90s, Pascal was "the" language that most people learned the basics in, at least in my country.

Unknowingly I sort of absorbed all that and it only started making sense when a few years later I decided to get into actual programming with perl and eggdrop bots and plugins or whatever they were called.

Damn, the 90s, IRC and Quake were awesome!

My graduate advisor had Microsoft FORTRAN, and I tried it out. It was a monstrosity. The compiler and linker had to be on separate floppies, and took eons. My advisor admitted that he had largely switched to BASIC.

I agree, but AI also there is hope!

For many years I've worried about the ever-growing depth of abstraction in computing. There are few alive now who actually understand all of the layers on abstraction involved in modern computing, and who can debug the truly strange edge case bugs and vulnerabilities introduced by the interoperation of these many complex layers.

For a time I imagined it to be an unsolvable problem, and that there would always be only a special class of neurodivergent hyper-specialists who still mostly had to work in large teams to even come close to understanding a stack in full. We're reaching the point where a single human lifespan just isn't enough to learn it all, even for those of us with what Dilbert called "The Knack". By the time you're proficient in all of it - you're dead.

Now there is a new kind of intelligence. One that CAN fit it all in a single mind, and one that will outlive us all and continue to learn long after our meat has gone bad.

As long as the AI's stay aligned, and we find ways to build them more efficiently there's a non-zero chance that they actually make it all better instead of worse. Genuinely long-term planning and the ability to TRULY grasp the full stack COULD actually happen. At least if we use these new systems in service of the greater good, and not just to play silly games on the stock market.

[1]: https://www.freepascal.org/

[2]: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

Don't know if the last bit is true, but they did make 150K in sales in the first month ... from a single ad and in 1980s dollars, which is quite remarkable.

A cool thing about TP was that it had simple and convenient support for inline assembly, which was the gateway drug for me learning more low level programming.

It’s really sad that Delphi didn’t take off like VB. It was a superior environment in every way. Faster programs, better UI, much better language, and I would argue easier to use (in VB you spent a lot of time working around the limitations of BASIC in my experience). Hard to compete with Microsoft though.

I didn’t realise at the time that, with the advent of web apps (and my interest in them), that chapter of my life would be the last time I would work with such a clean, integrated dev environment.

Not sure I can agree with this. My time with TP7 was fledgling, Delphi was my first "professional" language. Over the years since, I still get cold-called and -emailed from recruiters who would do anything but pay for a Delphi developer.

An interesting parallel with NT: Dave Cutler was hired by MS to replicate his success with VMS and built NT.

Likewise, Anders Hejlsberg was hired by MS to replicate his success with Delphi and built C#.

I think that's pretty impactful.

I used Turbo Pascal in 8th grade to create a simple type of 3d wireframe CAD-like tool on the PC in my bedroom.

Then in AP Computer Science in high school we had (TUI) Turbo Pascal also.

I always remember that type/style of TUI fondly. It periodically pops up in my head out of nowhere. Like just yesterday I randomly decided to add a Borland-style menu to my Starship prompt as an experiment. I accomplished that by writing about two sentences to an AI.

My actual job at this point is feeding tasks into AI and judging whether it answered just the way I wanted.

It was written in TurboPascal and saved its data with BTrieve. The whole thing ran under MP/M (a CP/M variant that had the concurrency support we needed) on a closely coupled network: A box with an S-100 bus where each user had their own system-on-a-card with an 8088 CPU. Our application wasn't client-server, each user had their own app and we had written our own code for network-based cooperative multitasking, as we called it in those early days.

Fifteen years later I was on a team that created a concurrency linter for Java. It inspected the behaviour of running J2EE servers and flagged runtime anti-patterns as concurrency smells to be investigated.

Everything felt so familiar, despite all of the tooling being complete different!

If you ever feel like you need a palate cleanser after reading AI code, go dig into any Fabrice Bellard project.

I think I used TP 7 and it was the usual blue IDE for DOS.

Almost nobody back then had the skills to implement something like TP, that's why it was so exceptional.

"Turbo" was also a short-lived pop-slang term roughly meaning "cool" or "awesome." I never heard it used much but a lot of products in that era had "turbo" in the name.

I wouldn’t necessarily have expected for Microsoft to make development (at least the “intended” way) for early not-just-DOS Windows this unergonomic, but now in hindsight, it’s also not that surprising, really.

This final version for Windows 3.1 might be compatible with 32-bit Windows installations under WoW16, no?

Windows 11 was the first version to ship that was 64-bit only.

I have fond memories of the language, the IDE, libs like TurboVision, ObjectWindows, etc... And fun times with the demos TVChess and OwlChess, which gave me inspiration.

The terminal IDE that it came with, if you can call it that, was ahead of its time.

I'm pretty sure Turbo Pascal 7 and Turbo Pascal for Windows were two different products.

OS/2 was more popular than Windows 3.1.

Update: or maybe it wasn't. Seems like different bubbles had different mainstream OS.

never forget

The printed documentation alone was half a meter long.