Turbo Pascal was introduced by Borland in November 1983. It turned 40 years old days ago.
Turbo Pascal was a milestone product for the industry, it started Borland as a company and it was the first popular Integrated Development Environment or IDE. It was a great product for the time, and its success was incredible.
You can read more about Turbo Pascal it in this recent blog post from David I, but also on Wikipedia and many other sources including blog posts of mine, including the talk I did this summer in the first Pascal World Congress in Salamanca.
At Embarcadero, the company continuing working on the successors of Turbo Pascal, we just shipped version 36 of that compiler. In fact when you read “Embarcadero Delphi for Win32 compiler version 36.0” (the version of the command line compiler in Delphi 12 Athens) the compiler version number, 36, dates back to the first Turbo Pascal. Not only that, we decided to dedicate the product Easter Egg to this great anniversary, which you can see above.
Happy 40th birthday, Turbo Pascal!
Design. Code. Compile. Deploy.
Start Free Trial Upgrade Today
Free Delphi Community Edition Free C++Builder Community Edition
TP was, and still is! a great IDE. Coupled with sidekick and maybe a few other TSR’s it made the PC an absolute weapon. As productive then as it is now. I still seek it out for jobs these days – when I want to do stuff in kilobytes on a terminal for example. Just a very pure way of programming. A real joy to use and once command shortcuts were grokked, a way to enter flow state. Happy days 🙂
Started with Turbo Pascal 3.0 in school in 1985.
This is realy long time ago!
And still loving it!!!!
I never used TP,but do remember seeing the shrink wrapped packages when working in London circa ’94. In those days I was a VB3 programmer, but as soon as D1 was released I went over to the other side, and have been there for 28 years. All happy days.
Ah.. Borland 😍
Purchased the original Turbo Pascal 1.0 in 1983/84. Came in a shrink wrapped plastic with a manual and disk at the time. Whilst I do programming in a few languages, I still enjoy coming back to Delphi for Windows projects, almost like a security blanket :-).
Heh… My introduction to Turbo Pascal happened accidentally in a public library’s computer room, on an aging Compaq. I was supposed to be researching for a history project, but instead, I got lost in the world of programming. That detour played a huge role in my decision to pursue a career in software engineering ;-))
I was in Los Angles at the time the first advertisement for Turbo Pascal appeared in a magazine. Programming for $ 99!!!! I had an Epson QX10 running CP/M and there was a CP/M version so I got on the phone and actually spoke to Phillipe Khan (aka Frank Borland) and ordered.
The package was waiting for me when I got back to New Zealand about 2 weeks later