5 ms·

The first ever computer program I wrote for $$$ was a retail point of sale system for a local pharmacy. I used Turbo Pascal for it, complete with my own propri

The first ever computer program I wrote for $$$ was a retail point of sale system for a local pharmacy. I used Turbo Pascal for it, complete with my own proprietary database files etc.! Later on, I wrote a front end menu system (which simply gave a customisable easy to select option of applications to run in DOS) that ended up being used on thousands of PC's throughout businesses and almost every government department in my town. Good Days. I downloaded the original Turbo Pascal v 1.x a couple of years back, and intended to try re-writing that point of sale system again to see how much I still remembered > 30 years later. Never got around to it, but I will make a concerted effort this year to try it out. I may just try it on this web emulator, seeing as I am now on a Mac! Thank you Anders Heljsberg! And to these guys for building a web emulator of the original compiler.

rasjani 10y ago
First ever paid lines of code: in pascal, for pharmacy. Albeit, i did stock ordering portion. Stock only had 300baud demodulator so all verifications had to done by eavesdropping the line with phone and if one didn't hear the correct signal, you had to press keyboard to retrigger the batch again. I had to code all this blind too because there was no test environment :)
- cyberferret 10y ago
  Nice! You are one better than me though, because I didn't have any connectivity with another system - it was all running standalone on their LAN. The stock room had to key in goods receipts manually after downloading info from their Vax PDP-8 stock management system. If I had more time (and they had more money) I might have worked out a way to automate that. :)
lumberjack 10y ago
There are still people in that line of business doing exactly that same thing in 2017.
ganley 10y ago
Turbo Pascal was also where I wrote my first professional software (not for $$$ - it was an internship - but I'm counting it). It was a program to gather, process, and display thermal data from an experiment rig. I also wrote a ton of stuff for fun in Turbo Pascal, but I doubt I still have any of that code.
aswanson 10y ago
Where did you download it from? I have an old program I wrote in Pascal I want to regenerate as well.
- cyberferret 10y ago
  Someone else posted the link below, but here it is: http://edn.embarcadero.com/museum/ http://edn.embarcadero.com/museum/ Embarcadero is the company that now owns all of Borland's IP (I believe), and they have released the older version of TP 1.x, 3.x and 5.x in their 'museum'.
mzs 10y ago
Same, mine was for mail merge for my wrestling coach's side job.
bdamm 10y ago
Same here, wrote a time accounting system for a local photocopy shop to keep track of how much time people were using on the (rented by the minute) computers. For $50. I was 15. Knew nothing of business. Good 'ol days :)
- baldfat 10y ago
  I was 15 and wrote a warehouse management system for $325. The guy stiffed me, but he still used it for 15 years.
cyberferret 10y ago
It is so cool to hear everyone else's stories about their first programming jobs in Turbo Pascal. Keep them coming! (Not so) Interesting side story: The menu system I talk about in my post above - I actually wrote a full screen editor for it, because I was sick of using EDLIN to edit batch files etc. all the time. My editor was I believe one of the first ones I had seen which let you use cursor keys to move around the screen, and it let you edit a mammoth 255 lines of DOS batch code(!) :) But it had ONE crucial bug that I never fixed - if you edited a line, you had to cursor off it or press [Enter] at the end of the line for it to commit your changes from the change buffer to the in memory copy of the file, so if you saved the batch file without doing this, your last changes would not get saved. To this day, more than 3 decades later. No matter what editor I am using (Sublime/Atom/VS Code etc.), that behaviour is ingrained in my psyche, and even if I make a single line change in my source code, I reflexively cursor OFF that line or press [Enter] before I hit 'save'...
- smitchell2 10y ago
  Back in 1984, I purchased Turbo Pascal 2, and had several decent contracts writing various sorts of software. In 1985 I wrote a simple programmers text editor in it (I really had no idea what I was doing - I learned as I went along), and released it as shareware. Folks started sending me checks, and by 1988 I had to hire staff to help me process and ship orders, do tech support, and so on. We peaked at 15 employees in the mid-90's. While I eventually converted everything to C, I still have very fond memories of Turbo Pascal. Those were the days!

rasjani 10y ago

First ever paid lines of code: in pascal, for pharmacy. Albeit, i did stock ordering portion. Stock only had 300baud demodulator so all verifications had to done by eavesdropping the line with phone and if one didn't hear the correct signal, you had to press keyboard to retrigger the batch again. I had to code all this blind too because there was no test environment :)

cyberferret 10y ago
Nice! You are one better than me though, because I didn't have any connectivity with another system - it was all running standalone on their LAN. The stock room had to key in goods receipts manually after downloading info from their Vax PDP-8 stock management system. If I had more time (and they had more money) I might have worked out a way to automate that. :)

lumberjack 10y ago

There are still people in that line of business doing exactly that same thing in 2017.

ganley 10y ago

Turbo Pascal was also where I wrote my first professional software (not for $$$ - it was an internship - but I'm counting it). It was a program to gather, process, and display thermal data from an experiment rig. I also wrote a ton of stuff for fun in Turbo Pascal, but I doubt I still have any of that code.

aswanson 10y ago

Where did you download it from? I have an old program I wrote in Pascal I want to regenerate as well.

cyberferret 10y ago
Someone else posted the link below, but here it is: http://edn.embarcadero.com/museum/ http://edn.embarcadero.com/museum/ Embarcadero is the company that now owns all of Borland's IP (I believe), and they have released the older version of TP 1.x, 3.x and 5.x in their 'museum'.

mzs 10y ago

Same, mine was for mail merge for my wrestling coach's side job.

bdamm 10y ago

Same here, wrote a time accounting system for a local photocopy shop to keep track of how much time people were using on the (rented by the minute) computers. For $50. I was 15. Knew nothing of business. Good 'ol days :)

baldfat 10y ago
I was 15 and wrote a warehouse management system for $325. The guy stiffed me, but he still used it for 15 years.

cyberferret 10y ago

It is so cool to hear everyone else's stories about their first programming jobs in Turbo Pascal. Keep them coming! (Not so) Interesting side story: The menu system I talk about in my post above - I actually wrote a full screen editor for it, because I was sick of using EDLIN to edit batch files etc. all the time. My editor was I believe one of the first ones I had seen which let you use cursor keys to move around the screen, and it let you edit a mammoth 255 lines of DOS batch code(!) :) But it had ONE crucial bug that I never fixed - if you edited a line, you had to cursor off it or press [Enter] at the end of the line for it to commit your changes from the change buffer to the in memory copy of the file, so if you saved the batch file without doing this, your last changes would not get saved. To this day, more than 3 decades later. No matter what editor I am using (Sublime/Atom/VS Code etc.), that behaviour is ingrained in my psyche, and even if I make a single line change in my source code, I reflexively cursor OFF that line or press [Enter] before I hit 'save'...

smitchell2 10y ago
Back in 1984, I purchased Turbo Pascal 2, and had several decent contracts writing various sorts of software. In 1985 I wrote a simple programmers text editor in it (I really had no idea what I was doing - I learned as I went along), and released it as shareware. Folks started sending me checks, and by 1988 I had to hire staff to help me process and ship orders, do tech support, and so on. We peaked at 15 employees in the mid-90's. While I eventually converted everything to C, I still have very fond memories of Turbo Pascal. Those were the days!