Thinking Back on 'Turbo Pascal' as It Turns 40

My first programming experience was on a PDP-8 using BASIC. Code, run, debug in a very tight loop. I was hooked.

Then in college, it was punch cards and a line printer, with long delays while waiting for the hardware to work, and your job to work its way through the system. The very opposite of a tight loop.

And then I got an IBM PC, and there was a glimmer of hope that I could recreate that early experience. But the tools were expensive, clunky, and slow.

And then there was Turbo Pascal. Cheap, blindingly fast, so much fun. That’s what we were all waiting for. A fantastic product.

Brings back fond memories. I was at JSC in Houston and took on a consulting job to convert a massive data manipulation and statistical analysis program that ran in COBOL on an IBM 370 to run on an IBM PC. I did a portion of the code in Turbo Pascal just for fun on a bet that it would run faster (in terms of user wait time) and it did—-45 minutes down to 5. Then I wrote the rest of the code, optimized, and got my first 80286-based PC and we got sub-minute processing times. At that point I convinced my friend that we could dispense with the collection of the massive data set via bubble scan sheets filled out in the field with an early laptop computer. We went through multiple iterations and improvements over a few years and the system ran for 15+ years, albeit on much improved hardware as time went on.