From: Neil Rubenking - ziffdavis.com
Sent: Thursday, November 20, 2008 9:14 AM
Subject: Turbo Pascal version 1.0
[ David I note: Neil Rubenking is an writer for PC Magazine covering programming, tools, and solutions to problems. He is the author of seven books on DOS, Windows, and Pascal/Delphi programming, including Delphi Programming for Dummies. ]
When I discovered Turbo Pascal in I-think 1983 I was in "starving student" mode. Even scraping up $49.95 was tough, but $500 for IBM’s Pascal was totally impossible. Learning Turbo Pascal really paid off, in many ways, not the least of which is my current position at PC Magazine.
The magazine’s editors (Bill Machrone, Gus Venditto, Paul Somerson, Bill Howard, maybe others) came to speak at the San Francisco PC User’s Group, of which I was president. Later they took the group’s officers out to dinner. One of them happened to note that their "User to User" column was getting a lot of questions about this oddball new Pascal compiler. When I mentioned my experience with the compiler and with writing for the user group’s newsletter, they invited me to take on the "User to User" column every other issue, calling it "Turbo Power User". The column evolved and changed over the years – now it’s called "Ask Neil".
I continued to write for PC Magazine and later contributed nearly 50 utilities (written in Turbo Pascal and Delphi, naturally) to the PC Magazine Utilities Library. I also wrote a number of books on the subject, though "Delphi Programming for Dummies" is the only one that earned out its advance. I’m not doing development any more except to create tools that I use in testing and evaluating security programs. But none of this would have happened if I hadn’t stumbled up on the original Turbo Pascal advertisement in BYTE.
{ 3 } Comments
Let’s do some math:
What would be the price for Turbo Pascal now (in 2008) after inflation adjustment considering that the price was $49.99 in 1983?
We can use the official version of Inflation Calculator from here:
http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl
So the price for Turbo Pascal in 2008 should be (could be) $108.70.
Since Turbo Pascal does not exist anymore, $108.70 could be very affordable (and very competitive) price for Delphi 2009 Professional right now.
Now let’s see $500 for IBM’s Pascal in 1983.
Considering the inflation $500 in 1983 shall be $1,087.21 in 2008.
What we see now that "New User DVD" price for Delphi 2009 Professional for USA now is $899.99
But for European markets, for example, for France the price is 799.00EUR (about $1039.98 considering today’s 1.3038 USD/EUR exchange rate).
Thus the price for Delphi 2009 Professional in 2008 is exactly the same as $500 for IBM’s Pascal in 1983.
Do your conclusions…
My conclusion is that, for $49.99, I had an IDE, a procedure-based compiler and a pretty basic RTL. If you needed anything more, you were on your own; writing line characters to the screen buffer to create a GUI for your app, buying books to discover the BIOS interrupts, not to mention which work as advertised and which don’t, by experiment and word of mouth.
Secondly, Anders’ posting indicates how many man-hours needed to be recovered back then. Not many. Delphi offers far more out-of-the-box, has to deal with a far more complex environment, has a vastly more sophisticated language and contains integrated debugging and other tools I could only have dreamed of when I had (in my case) Turbo 3.01
Roman - I admit that I can’t find fault with your calculation of prices today vs during TP1 times.
I do make an exception to any comparisons of the features/benefits of Delphi 2009 Professional versus what capabilities TP1 had. You can do WAY more with Delphi 2009 Professional - way way way more than either TP1 or IBM Pascal could do in 1983.
Maybe we should re-introduce the Turbo Pascal compiler and simple RTL again at the price you mention, $108 and change? But Delphi 2009 Professional is so much more than just a language compiler and RTL.
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