They don't make 'em like that any more: Borland Turbo Pascal 7

Turbo Pascal was a glorious tool for my imaginative 15-year-old brain. The first programs I sold were all written in Turbo Pascal. I had the Turbo Pascal reference books near my bedside, and I wish I still had them because they were dog-eared, post-it noted, margin-scribbled, and it's kind of strange but those books guided my future almost more than any other written text.

One distinct memory stands out. I could not wrap my mind around the Object-Oriented extensions on Pascal. I read, re-read, and re-re-read the section of the book describing what polymorhpism is and how it worked, probably at least a dozen times. Somehow it seemed really important and I kept coming back to it. I worked the examples. And then one day the ah-hah moment arrived. I remember it felt like a shock, why it was useful and what I could do with it. I promptly used my knowledge to write a new game using OOP principles to guide the rudimentary "characters" of various geometric shapes at the core of the game.

Fun times, and very formative to me!

Required reading, "Things Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than", https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html

And: "A Personal History of Compilation Speed, Part 2" https://prog21.dadgum.com/47.html

Man, I haven’t seen Turbo Pascal since high school. We were lucky enough to have a CompSci class taught by our Stats teacher.

He offered three courses. CompSci 1 used Turbo Pascal and Delphi. CompSci 2 used C++ and Java. CompSci 3 used Microsoft Turbo Assembly and a language of the student’s choice.

We had to write our code and save them to floppy discs for submission since the lab systems had DeepFreeze installed on Win95, so any local storage wouldn’t persist.

> "That almost nobody has the skills these days to implement something like TP is something we could eventually come to regret – or, rather, our grandchildren could. Software development is becoming a semi-skilled industry, and I doubt that the rise of AI will entirely compensate for this."

I agree, but AI also there is hope!

For many years I've worried about the ever-growing depth of abstraction in computing. There are few alive now who actually understand all of the layers on abstraction involved in modern computing, and who can debug the truly strange edge case bugs and vulnerabilities introduced by the interoperation of these many complex layers.

For a time I imagined it to be an unsolvable problem, and that there would always be only a special class of neurodivergent hyper-specialists who still mostly had to work in large teams to even come close to understanding a stack in full. We're reaching the point where a single human lifespan just isn't enough to learn it all, even for those of us with what Dilbert called "The Knack". By the time you're proficient in all of it - you're dead.

Now there is a new kind of intelligence. One that CAN fit it all in a single mind, and one that will outlive us all and continue to learn long after our meat has gone bad.

As long as the AI's stay aligned, and we find ways to build them more efficiently there's a non-zero chance that they actually make it all better instead of worse. Genuinely long-term planning and the ability to TRULY grasp the full stack COULD actually happen. At least if we use these new systems in service of the greater good, and not just to play silly games on the stock market.

This hits home. Turbo Pascal was the thing (although I've barely noticed at the time) where I learned actual programming, as we know now.

I had played a lot with the Spectrum (a Sinclair zx spectrum 128k) and its BASIC interpreter but that was mostly copying from magazines and changing some parameters. And BASIC is weird :)

A few years later in school in the 90s, Pascal was "the" language that most people learned the basics in, at least in my country.

Unknowingly I sort of absorbed all that and it only started making sense when a few years later I decided to get into actual programming with perl and eggdrop bots and plugins or whatever they were called.

Damn, the 90s, IRC and Quake were awesome!

My very first professional gig, in the mid-1980s, was extending a classified ads application that was used by telephone operators in teh days when you could call a newspaper or magazine and dictate your ad over the phone.

It was written in TurboPascal and saved its data with BTrieve. The whole thing ran under MP/M (a CP/M variant that had the concurrency support we needed) on a closely coupled network: A box with an S-100 bus where each user had their own system-on-a-card with an 8088 CPU. Our application wasn't client-server, each user had their own app and we had written our own code for network-based cooperative multitasking, as we called it in those early days.

Fifteen years later I was on a team that created a concurrency linter for Java. It inspected the behaviour of running J2EE servers and flagged runtime anti-patterns as concurrency smells to be investigated.

Everything felt so familiar, despite all of the tooling being complete different!

Fun anecdote: When I was in college, my dad read an article in the Wall Street Journal about Turbo Pascal, so he bought me a copy for my birthday. That was version 1. I stuck with TP through grad school and a little bit beyond. It seemed like there wasn't anything it couldn't do. Some of my hardware hacking adventures even required inline assembly. Some of the version bumps were really timely, such as a new compiler that created stand-alone executables. I was extremely lucky that the original TP ran on my non-PC-compatible MS-DOS machine, a Sanyo MBC550.

My graduate advisor had Microsoft FORTRAN, and I tried it out. It was a monstrosity. The compiler and linker had to be on separate floppies, and took eons. My advisor admitted that he had largely switched to BASIC.

It was with Turbo Pascal that I started to code in earnest as a child. I am so grateful for the authors and for the friend from school who gave me a copy, and taught me Pascal.

A cool thing about TP was that it had simple and convenient support for inline assembly, which was the gateway drug for me learning more low level programming.

It’s really sad that Delphi didn’t take off like VB. It was a superior environment in every way. Faster programs, better UI, much better language, and I would argue easier to use (in VB you spent a lot of time working around the limitations of BASIC in my experience). Hard to compete with Microsoft though.

I didn’t realise at the time that, with the advent of web apps (and my interest in them), that chapter of my life would be the last time I would work with such a clean, integrated dev environment.

My first real programming project was creating a pong clone on DOS using Turbo Pascal, as a 12 year old, in the mid 90s. Many years later, when I was in the penultimate year of uni, I worked as a freelance Delphi programmer. I had no idea Pascal would help me buy my first car many years later.

The best things about TP and even VB was how fast everything was to develop. When I'm sitting there watching our CI build take 45 minutes to deploy, I still remember turning around changes and copying to release file server in just a few minutes.

Anyone remember Turbo Pascal DiskTutor? My older brother bought that for me for my birthday and I used it to learn object oriented programming. This was DOS still.

I used Turbo Pascal in 8th grade to create a simple type of 3d wireframe CAD-like tool on the PC in my bedroom.

Then in AP Computer Science in high school we had (TUI) Turbo Pascal also.

I always remember that type/style of TUI fondly. It periodically pops up in my head out of nowhere. Like just yesterday I randomly decided to add a Borland-style menu to my Starship prompt as an experiment. I accomplished that by writing about two sentences to an AI.

My actual job at this point is feeding tasks into AI and judging whether it answered just the way I wanted.

Borland-linked piece of lore I like the best is that upon release of the original Turbo Pascal, which was advertised in the Byte magazine for $49.99, they were drowned in orders so much so that the Post Office put stop on incoming checks because they suspected it was some sort of fraud.

Don't know if the last bit is true, but they did make 150K in sales in the first month ... from a single ad and in 1980s dollars, which is quite remarkable.

Check out FreePascal[1] if you want a modern compiler toolchain that's largely compatible with TP7, and Lazarus[2] if you want a modern alternative to Delphi.

[1]: https://www.freepascal.org/

[2]: https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

tcc/tinycc doesn't have the IDE but is the same compiler approach applied to modern(ish) C. Tiny, fast, and fun to use.

If you ever feel like you need a palate cleanser after reading AI code, go dig into any Fabrice Bellard project.

"...it can’t produce code that runs on modern Windows systems, and few people have much interest in early Windows."

This final version for Windows 3.1 might be compatible with 32-bit Windows installations under WoW16, no?

Windows 11 was the first version to ship that was 64-bit only.

> TP 7, also known as Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.5

I'm pretty sure Turbo Pascal 7 and Turbo Pascal for Windows were two different products.

I was about 15 when a school friend and I spent entire days writing simple video games in Turbo Pascal. That experience is what got me into programming, and it became foundational for my entire career. I still look back at those days with a big smile.

The only real association I have with "Borland" is that I needed their $199 compiler to share my LibertyBasic programs with friends as .exe's when I was in middle school. That was a ton of money in the late 90's. It was singlehandedly the catalyst to me realizing I could pirate more than game roms on IRC.

> That almost nobody has the skills these days to implement something like TP is something we could eventually come to regret

Almost nobody back then had the skills to implement something like TP, that's why it was so exceptional.

Is Turbo Pascal 7 really the same as Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.5?

I think I used TP 7 and it was the usual blue IDE for DOS.

> The name ‘Turbo’ was associated with what were regarded as hobbyist products

"Turbo" was also a short-lived pop-slang term roughly meaning "cool" or "awesome." I never heard it used much but a lot of products in that era had "turbo" in the name.

As someone born after the release of TP 7, this was a fascinating read!

I wouldn’t necessarily have expected for Microsoft to make development (at least the “intended” way) for early not-just-DOS Windows this unergonomic, but now in hindsight, it’s also not that surprising, really.

Oh those were the days, I remember developing my first non-trivial piece of software (an international checkers game), while still a student, with Turbo Pascal. It run to more than a thousand lines of basically the Minimax algorithm plus various optimizations (alpha beta pruning, quiescent extensions, etc)

I have fond memories of the language, the IDE, libs like TurboVision, ObjectWindows, etc... And fun times with the demos TVChess and OwlChess, which gave me inspiration.

Maybe unfair, but at the time I had to do a project in Turbo Pascal. Up 'till then I had been using Think Pascal on the Mac. There was no comparison. I felt like I was trown back a decade. Not that the raw capability was that different, but boy, the UX. I hated it.

Man, I have so many good memories as 9 or 10 year old kid writing Turbo Pascal 7.

The terminal IDE that it came with, if you can call it that, was ahead of its time.

I used Borland OWL under Windows at school. I moved to Java later on and felt the sting on the last line...

I can definitely vouch for Turbo Pascal, having learnt it before C was definitely a good school that strongly typed languages doesn't hinder systems programming, nor higher level ergonomics.

TP 7 you say?? That's the one that made me quit - they could pry the blue ascii IDE out of my cold, dead (high schooler) hands

> Windows 3.1 [] not that there were many alternatives at that time

OS/2 was more popular than Windows 3.1.

Update: or maybe it wasn't. Seems like different bubbles had different mainstream OS.

great writeup, fun reminder windows 3.1 sat on top of dos

TPC.EXE /C

never forget

Never been a big Pascal fan (though learned and used it back in the day) but i learned C and built my first Win16 and Win32 Apps for Windows 3.x and Windows 95 in Borland Turbo C(++). That was truly magical a time!

The printed documentation alone was half a meter long.

No, now you are running an IDE that is badly pretending not to be a browser, while an entire second application has to work in the background eating even more RAM to provide you with access to documentation for each function at the cursor...

I have learned PC programming on the DOS version.