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Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

>> But what kid growing up in the 80s would go out of their way to purchase a Pascal compiler

On the IBM PC, Turbo Pascal was cheap and hugely popular in the late 80's and early 90's for hobbyists. Mind-blowingly faster than BASIC and you could mix in assembly. Lots of demos and games (and BBS doors) were written in Pascal.

http://archive.gamedev.net/archive/reference/listed82.html?c...

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In 1983 Turbo Pascal sold for about $50.00 meaning some 40 years later that price would be equivalent to about $250.00 given an inflation figure at about 3.5% per annum. By comparison, a very expensive IBM PC shipped with a free version of Microsoft BASIC burnt into the ROM.

True, but by comparison Microsoft BASIC was, for lack of a better word, useless for anything serious.

Plus, don't forget hobbyists would 'borrow' software from each other, you'd get a free (possibly older version) of a compiler with a book...

I think I paid $69 for Turbo Pascal (spent all my birthday money in 1992), previous to that I had an old version of Microsoft Quick Pascal that was only $14.95 from Surplus Software. As well as Turbo C 1 that came with a book from SAMS publishing.

Not contradicting you, just adding the context that there was BASIC compilers that could speed things up significantly. Not sure of the cost or the the relative performance, but it was fast enough to build commercial products with.

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