Turbo Pascal is 40
A defining technology for my career
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.
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