Maybe unfair, but at the time I had to do a project in Turbo Pascal. Up 'till then I had been using Think Pascal on the Mac. There was no comparison. I felt like I was trown back a decade. Not that the raw capability was that different, but boy, the UX. I hated it.

Oh those were the days, I remember developing my first non-trivial piece of software (an international checkers game), while still a student, with Turbo Pascal. It run to more than a thousand lines of basically the Minimax algorithm plus various optimizations (alpha beta pruning, quiescent extensions, etc)

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.

Man, I have so many good memories as 9 or 10 year old kid writing Turbo Pascal 7.

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

I used Borland OWL under Windows at school. I moved to Java later on and felt the sting on the last line...

I can definitely vouch for Turbo Pascal, having learnt it before C was definitely a good school that strongly typed languages doesn't hinder systems programming, nor higher level ergonomics.

TP 7 you say?? That's the one that made me quit - they could pry the blue ascii IDE out of my cold, dead (high schooler) hands

> Windows 3.1 [] not that there were many alternatives at that time

OS/2 was more popular than Windows 3.1.

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

great writeup, fun reminder windows 3.1 sat on top of dos

TPC.EXE /C

never forget

Never been a big Pascal fan (though learned and used it back in the day) but i learned C and built my first Win16 and Win32 Apps for Windows 3.x and Windows 95 in Borland Turbo C(++). That was truly magical a time!

The printed documentation alone was half a meter long.