Things That Turbo Pascal Is Smaller Than (2011)
Turbo Pascal was an IDE and a blazingly fast compiler. In 1986, I ran it on my 64k IBM PC (8088 4MHz). It was like nothing else I had experienced previously. Prior to that, I had developed software in grad school on punch cards. I occasionally had access to a PDP-11. I don't remember what editor I used, but it certainly wasn't an IDE. It may have been line-oriented. At work, we had a VMS system, and I had access to a C compiler and my first emacs. Not too bad, but nothing as immediate and responsive as Turbo Pascal.<p>Viewed another way, Turbo Pascal recaptured the incredibly rapid edit/run cycle that I first experienced with a PDP-8M running BASIC. Only now, I had 64k instead of my shared of 12k shared among a maximum of four users, an IDE instead of a line editor, and a far better language.<p>Turbo Pascal also blew away anything else available on the PC. I had a C compiler from Microsoft that was far more expensive and far slower.<p>Turbo Pascal was a truly magical piece of software. I remember that I had some initial skepticism about it. As I recall, it took some liberties with the language. But once I finally used it, I was instantly converted.<p>IMHO, nothing has quite captured that experience of development until IntelliJ, starting with 4.x or 5.x.