November 28, 2023 - Turbo Pascal turns 40
Turbo Pascal was introduced by Borland in November 1983. It’s officially turning 40 years old this month.
Turbo Pascal was a milestone product for the industry, it started Borland as a company and it was the first popular Integrated Development Environment or IDE. It was a great product for the time, and its success was incredible.
You can read more about Turbo Pascal it in this recent blog post from David I, but also on Wikipedia and many other sources including blog posts of mine, including the talk I did this summer in the first Pascal World Congress in Salamanca.
At Embarcadero, the company continuing working on the successors of Turbo Pascal, we just shipped version 36 of that compiler. In fact when you read “Embarcadero Delphi for Win32 compiler version 36.0” (the version of the command line compiler in Delphi 12 Athens) the compiler version number, 36, dates back to the first Turbo Pascal. Not only that, we decided to dedicate the product Easter Egg to this great anniversary.
Found an old turbo pascal floppy tucked away.
I was just reminiscing with my colleagues - a whole bunch of us started with Pascal (and maybe a little LOGO) :)
I’ve got no idea what it does to be honest.