Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!sco!gorn!filbo
From: filbo@gorn.santa-cruz.ca.us (Bela Lubkin)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Turbo Pascal
Keywords: long, speculation, spam
Message-ID: <106.filbo@gorn.santa-cruz.ca.us>
Date: 16 Dec 89 23:29:19 GMT
References: <129266@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Lines: 53
X-Claimer: I >am< R Pentomino!

In reply to article <129266@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> by Chuck McManis:

Chuck, you are on the right track, but this is closer to what actually
happened:

Borland and Commodore had an agreement (formal? I don't know) that Turbo
Pascal would be the 'official Pascal language of the Amiga'; this might
actually have been the 'official language of the Amiga' -- that's what I
heard, but find it a bit incredible.  Borland was also given to
understand that the Amiga would be priced in the $500 range, plus
peripherals.

When Commodore was nearly ready to release the Amiga, Turbo Pascal was
not yet ready to go.  MetaComCo had already shown their ability to port
quickly to the Amiga by turning TriPOS into AmigaDOS.  Commodore asked
them also to port their Pascal compiler.

The Amiga was released, and MetaComCo Pascal was as 'official' a Pascal
compiler as it had -- I don't remember whether Commodore themselves
marketed it, but it came from a company the wrote part of the OS, which
made it seem official.

This, not surprisingly, annoyed Borland.  What annoyed them -- or, more
precisely, Philippe Kahn, Borland's president -- even more was the price
of the machine.  Borland had made its name by selling great software at
great prices.  Philippe was very strong on that philosophy and was
bitterly disappointed when Commodore released the Amiga at $1295 for the
CPU.  He felt that the resulting software market would be far smaller
and less worth pursuing.

Finally, I believe the Mac version of Turbo Pascal, which had been
expected to do very well, was bombing out around that time.

So between the loss of 'official' status (caused by both parties, but
mostly by Borland's slowness in development), the unexpected price
increase (and smaller expected market) on the machine, and the
unexpectedly poor showing of Borland's other Turbo Pascal port, the
project was shelved.

Some of the factors Chuck lists -- Commodore's firing of the Amiga
development staff, financial instability, etc., could have been factors
except that they didn't happen until after the machine's release, while
the end of the Turbo Pascal project came before or only slightly after.
Another, the instability of v24/v27/1.0 OSes, probably had a lot to do
with it, in the sense of slowing development.  I suspect that, had
Borland had a finished product by the time the Amiga shipped, they would
have marketed it even in the face of the machine's higher price and
CBM's financial woes.  'official' status would not have been a problem
since it would have gotten it.

Bela Lubkin    * *    //  filbo@gorn.santa-cruz.ca.us  CI$: 73047,1112 (slow)
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R Pentomino    *   \X/  Filbo @ Pyrzqxgl +408-476-4633 and XBBS +408-476-4945