Reminiscing about Turbo Pascal

Sometimes you come across a video that brings back memories.

I recently encountered this video on YouTube that walks the viewer through getting started with Turbo Pascal. Obviously it is unlikely that anyone would use it for the original purpose nowadays but for those of us old enough to have started our careers using it it is great to reminisce.

The thing that struck me about this was not the language but the “IDE”. It was one of the first that allowed editing, compiling and debugging within the same tool. By today’s standards it was primitive but it had the fundamentals for debugging including watching values and breakpoints.

This was written in the days before GUIs. It was text based but still supported the use of a mouse.

I don’t miss it but it certainly helped set me up for the career I have now.

Links

Learn Turbo Pascal - a video series originally released on VHS