3 ms·
.. thats the story I was hoping to read, and have been waiting for, for many years. I went from the necessity of A86 assembler, thru the desperation of GW-Basi
by jgord 11y ago
.. thats the story I was hoping to read, and have been waiting for, for many years.
I went from the necessity of A86 assembler, thru the desperation of GW-Basic .. finally finding Turbo Pascal, which was a revelation at the time, just this phenomenal product and superb piece of engineering.
Pulldown text menus, draggable text windows, editor out of the box .. fast compilation, wow - to me its one of the great monuments of computer history. I feel intensely nostalgic looking back on it now.
And their manuals were first rate.. classy all round.
- Supraperplex 11y agoDesperation of GW-Basic?! Be glad you had that one. The other BASICs of those times where much more limited! GW was a little bit of awesome in it's own way. Oh, and POKE and PEEK.
- insulanian 11y agoYeah, my first lines were in QuickBASIC :)
- analog31 11y agoMy dad, who knew nothing about computers, saw an article in the Wall Street Journal about this guy with a new business model for selling software. On a whim, he got me a copy for my birthday. It was TP version 1. I stuck with TP through version 5, and even convinced my college teachers to let me use it for my programming assignments rather than whatever was on the college mainframe. The manuals were indeed a huge asset. You didn't really need to know anything about the OS, or go digging for third party documentation online, which was important because there was no online.
- vetinari 11y agoI learned programming by digging through TP6 online help. That and Ralf Brown's Interrupt List, so I could do something useful.
- analog31 11y agoOops! What I meant was, there was no such thing as "online" at all, when TP1 came out. ;-)
- vetinari 11y agoOnline as in "hlp file that's shown when you press F1". At the time online meant "not printed" :-)
- analog31 11y agoAh, yes. Now I get it. I'm kinda slow on the uptake sometimes. ;-) I stopped with TP5. At that point, I was up to my ears in my thesis project, and was not going to change any of my tools. Plus I'm a real tightwad. By the time I finally finished my degree, got a new job, and a new computer, it was an Apple Mac. And the modern OS's kind of killed my interest in programming for a while.
- ido 11y agoLightspeed Pascal (later renamed THINK Pascal) was a similarly solid compiler+IDE from about the same era for the early Macintosh.
- Tloewald 11y agoIt all went downhill after they got bought by Symantec.