Turbo Pascal is 40

Turbo Pascal is 40 years old and it had a big impact on the direction of my career.

My final year project at university was a tool for teaching children about number series using an animated plane to fly between islands. It was written using Turbo Pascal.

I was able to leverage my knowledge of Pascal to land my first job after university. I was recruited to develop the front end of a DOS based application used by public libraries all over Europe. Most of the code was written using Turbo Pascal.

It was later replaced by a tool called Stony Brook Pascal - a drop in replacement that was meant to be fully compatible but generated faster and more smaller code. On the whole it mostly worked as long as you were “selective” with the optimisations it performed.

Over time this was replaced by C and C++ with a sprinkling of assembler for some device drivers however without Turbo Pascal I would not be where I am today.

Links

Turbo Pascal turns 40

Random Posts

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard P. Rumelt

  • March 17, 2018

I’ve had this book a while but never got around to reading it properly. One of my colleagues at work was listening to the audio version of it and recommended it. This was an excellent read and very relevant to what is happening at the company I am working at at the moment. For me the key takeaway was that what most people call strategy is not actually strategy but vision or goals. Strategy is setting a direction and what needs to happen to achieve it. The observations about the approaches of Walmart and Cisco were particularly good.


Read More

Prototyping is not always coding

  • May 10, 2023

Part of my current role is prototyping new features and algorithms to determine if and how they will work. It’s nice to do some hands on coding still.


Read More

  • January 1, 1


Read More