They don't make 'em like that any more: Borland Turbo Pascal 7

Posted by andsoitis 5 hours ago

They don't make 'em like that any more: Borland Turbo Pascal 7(kevinboone.me)

167 points | 92 commentspage 2

armcat 5 hours ago|

My first real programming project was creating a pong clone on DOS using Turbo Pascal, as a 12 year old, in the mid 90s. Many years later, when I was in the penultimate year of uni, I worked as a freelance Delphi programmer. I had no idea Pascal would help me buy my first car many years later.

analog31 4 hours ago||

Fun anecdote: When I was in college, my dad read an article in the Wall Street Journal about Turbo Pascal, so he bought me a copy for my birthday. That was version 1. I stuck with TP through grad school and a little bit beyond. It seemed like there wasn't anything it couldn't do. Some of my hardware hacking adventures even required inline assembly. Some of the version bumps were really timely, such as a new compiler that created stand-alone executables. I was extremely lucky that the original TP ran on my non-PC-compatible MS-DOS machine, a Sanyo MBC550.

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.

huhtenberg 3 hours ago||

Borland-linked piece of lore I like the best is that upon release of the original Turbo Pascal, which was advertised in the Byte magazine for $49.99, they were drowned in orders so much so that the Post Office put stop on incoming checks because they suspected it was some sort of fraud.

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.

eesmith 14 minutes ago|

According to Kahn, in this enjoyable read from a year later, at https://archive.org/details/micro-cornucopia-magazine-1984-1... .

> The ad broke in November, and that month we took in 1100 orders. So the ad was paid for. The second month we took in 2500 orders.

It's a bit tricky to figure out the exact breakdown since it requires knowing when people got a copy of that issue of Byte, how long it took for their mail order to get to Borland, and how many copies were sold per order. Turbo Pascal wasn't even released until November 20.

Still, my eyeballing says 150K in the first month is pretty much spot-on.

The ad, by the way, cost $9,000, to be read by 400,000 people world-wide. Each physical unit cost about $4 to produce. And all the orders were filled by hand for the first couple months.

FWIW, they also did word-of-mouth (like at COMDEX) and used dealers.

I tried but failed to find the ad. Archive.org is having problems, with very slow response times, failing searches, and failing downloads. I think the Byte issue is at https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1983-10/ . Wow! It's 675 pages long, and a topic for that issue is "Unix on Micros", with 9 articles about different aspects of Unix.

(I assume it needed all those articles to balance out the humongous number of ads, so they could get a lower postage rate.)

Here's Borland's ad a year later for TP 2.0 - https://archive.org/details/Computer_Language_Issue_01_1984-... and here's Dr. Dobbs' review of 1.01 in their June 1984 publication - https://archive.org/details/1984-06-dr-dobbs-journal/page/74... . Oh, and an article about it in Germany in September 1984 at https://archive.org/details/peeker-1984-01/page/50/mode/2up?... .

florisvink 2 hours ago||

I was about 15 when a school friend and I spent entire days writing simple video games in Turbo Pascal. That experience is what got me into programming, and it became foundational for my entire career. I still look back at those days with a big smile.

_russross 4 hours ago||

tcc/tinycc doesn't have the IDE but is the same compiler approach applied to modern(ish) C. Tiny, fast, and fun to use.

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

monster_truck 4 hours ago||

The only real association I have with "Borland" is that I needed their $199 compiler to share my LibertyBasic programs with friends as .exe's when I was in middle school. That was a ton of money in the late 90's. It was singlehandedly the catalyst to me realizing I could pirate more than game roms on IRC.

hasley 4 hours ago||

Is Turbo Pascal 7 really the same as Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.5?

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

pjmlp 1 hour ago|

Not at all, Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.5 was an intermediate release between Turbo Pascal 6 and 7.

Although Turbo Pascal 7 has MS-DOS extenders support, and could target Windows 3.1 as well.

Then came Delphi.

BigTTYGothGF 2 hours ago||

> That almost nobody has the skills these days to implement something like TP is something we could eventually come to regret

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

SoftTalker 4 hours ago||

> The name ‘Turbo’ was associated with what were regarded as hobbyist products

"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.

Sharlin 4 hours ago||

The intensifier meaning of "turbo", connoting something powerful and fast, is also interesting. Its original uses are in engineering, simply denoting something that has a turbine in it. Thus turbopump, turbojet, and turbocharger, the last of which probably being the primary driver of the semantic shift.

The Latin root of "turbo" and "turbine" is turbo, meaning a whirlwind, a spinning top, or more generally any spinning motion as a noun, and "agitate, disturb" as a verb. The latter word is, of course, derived from turbo as well, as are "perturb", "turbulence", "turbid", and even "trouble"!

bombarolo 4 hours ago|||

There was that “Turbo” button on my (self-made) 386sx, that magically doubled the CPU clock. This is what “turbo” meant in the 90s, weird.

SoftTalker 3 hours ago||

Yeah a lot of them had that turbo button. I always thought it was kind of a Spinal Tap thing.

"Why don't you just run it at the faster speed all the time, and make that the regular speed?"

"Ours have turbo"

mike_hearn 3 hours ago||

For those who don't remember, the turbo button existed as a backwards compatibility hack. A lot of games in the early days did dumb stuff like implement game timing loops by spinning the CPU, because devs just didn't think ahead to "what if people play my game on hardware that doesn't exist yet". So when the first big leaps in clock speed came out, some games ran unplayably fast. The fix was a literal button on the front of the machine that controlled the clock speed.

Devs learned how to use the timer chips pretty fast after that though, so for a long time the turbo button existed but appeared to be useless. Pushing it would toggle a light but nothing appeared to change.

andsoitis 1 hour ago||

Turbo Boost. Intel still talks about it on their website: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/gaming/resources/tur...

msdz 5 hours ago|

As someone born after the release of TP 7, this was a fascinating read!

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.

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