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Comment by shzhdbi09gv8ioi | Hacker News Reader

> But what kid growing up in the 80s would go out of their way to purchase a Pascal compiler and learn an academically oriented language

Me, and most of my friends pirated Turbo Pascal and had a blast with it. This was the early 90s mind you. Rapid Windows GUI prototyping, inline assembly and compile to .EXE, way better than qbasic / gwbasic of before. And it took years for Visual Basic to catch up (if it ever did).

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The 90s is significantly later though. In the mid-1980s I had (access to) a computer with 4096 bytes of RAM. Few enough that you could have a printed chart of what they're all for because that's just 64 x 64 grid.

Because the BASIC interpreter lives in ROM, that's "free". Some of the 4096 bytes is house keeping data for the system, but most of it can be used by your program and your data. Whereas Pascal doesn't live in the ROM, so if we're going to run Pascal software the entire Pascal runtime must fit in RAM before our program and data.

By the late 1980s I had a computer with 128kB of RAM, and sure that might have been a good place to try Pascal, if I'd been aware of Pascal, but I was not.

Yes, to anyone who was there the difference between computing in 1980 vs 1989 is night and day. Personal computing changed completely and you really either wanted assembly or BASIC (OK Fourth if you're kinky) in the early 80s with 4k of RAM... because that's what other people had. TurboPascal was released about '84, but I didn't see anyone using it until '86.

I feel like Pascal was a nice gateway into C from Fortran/BASIC, but it arrived so late I'm not sure it was really efficient in terms of learning.

In 1986 and early 1987, PC's did not have more than 640kb of RAM, just about all the programming tools for IBM PC's were limited to 64kb program size, and there were all kinds of really mickey-mouse ways to try to get around those limits. There were 80286 computers that could use 16 MB without too much trouble, but in 1987 programming tools that could use the full 640 kb of the 8086 and link separately compiled code showed up (e.g. Turbo Pascal 4.0), the same year the the 32-bit 80386 desktop PC's were launched. Borland's Pascal and Delphi pretty much matched the capabilities of Microsoft's C and C++ through those first disorienting years of change.

I definitely had Turbo Pascal in the 80's as a 16/17 year old. Started with version 2.0, in 1985. I still have a Turbo Pascal 3.0 manual and a set of 5.5 manuals (the latter of which included a nice little booklet intro to OOP.) Just checked, the copyright page of the 3.0 manual is copyright 1983, 1984, 1985. The 5.5 manual is 1987,1988. I managed to get a summer job programming in Turbo Pascal in 1987.

In 1980s I used (pirated) Hisoft Pascal on a Zx Spectrum clone (48 KB of memory). It wasn’t as nice as Turbo Pascal but it was great for computations - by 8 bit standards it was very fast. I learned about Pascal from a computer magazine article that disparaged Basic and encouraged “structured” programming.

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