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From: wilker@gauss.math.purdue.edu (Clarence Wilkerson)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.pascal
Subject: Re: Turbo Pascal history
Message-ID: <5441@mentor.cc.purdue.edu>
Date: 8 Feb 91 14:23:46 GMT
References: <1991Feb6.001222.15320@IRO.UMontreal.CA> <29885@usc> <1991Feb6.205927.8573@ims.alaska.edu> <1991Feb8.060608.21159@marlin.jcu.edu.au>
Sender: news@mentor.cc.purdue.edu
Reply-To: wilker@gauss.math.purdue.edu.UUCP (Clarence Wilkerson)
Organization: Purdue University, West Lafayette
Lines: 18

I have to second the bombshell effect that Turbo Pascal for CP/M
had. People had been burned by a buggy slow-to-be-delivered
JRT PASCAL, and when Turbo Pascal came out it was not believed
at first. I had struggled with UCSD Pascal on a Heath 89.
Besides the slowness of the product, hardware devices were
impossible to add on if not supported in the release you bought.
I painfully dis-assembled the p-code interpreter and separated
it from the hardware support to produce a version that ran off
the CP/M bios, and thus could be adapted to different disk drives.
Shortly after the end of this grand achievement, Turbo Pascal
came out and made it all moot!
  Even on the PC, the difference in programming ease between
Turbo and Microsoft Pascal was striking. My estimate of one
colleague's skills went up several notches when he told me that
he had produced a running program under MS Pascal in under two
weeks.

Clarence Wilkerson