3 ms·

Ask HN: In the 80s, was the PC best for learning to program due to Turbo Pascal?

2 points by amichail 4y ago

Would you have got one if you could have afforded it at the time?

PaulHoule 4y ago
My parents bought a TRS-80 Coco for $400 in 1981. I had the power supply burn out and then replaced it with a Coco 3 as soon as the Coco 3 came out. Around 1987 I switched to a 286 PC that cost $1200 inclusive of a monochrome monitor, a 1.2 MB floppy drive and a hard drive. When I add up everything I spent on the Coco (2 disk drives, disk controller, multi pack, UART serial card, music card, Tandy branded tape deck, joysticks, special monitor, software, modem, ..) it added up to more than what I spent on my first PC, With the Coco I learned to program in BASIC, Assembly and C. I also wrote my own FORTH. The 286 was crazy fast and affordable to alternatives like the Mac 2. Turbo Pascal was my favorite language to work with on the PC, but I switched to C when I went to college because it was portable to Sun workstations. In terms of performance a good 286 machine beat the pants off the old 8-bit machines: my first experience using a software emulator was writing BASIC programs for a CP/M system under an emulator that ran faster than a real Z-80 computer.
dave4420 4y ago
No, because you had to pay extra for Turbo Pascal. Most PCs came with GW Basic. Most home computers came with some dialect of Basic. If you didn’t already know how to program, why would you pay extra for Turbo Pascal?
- amichail 4y ago
  Turbo Pascal is a better intro to programming than Basic — especially Basic dialects without built-in graphics commands.
  - dave4420 4y ago
    But if you had yet to learn to program… would you know that?
mikewarot 4y ago
It really didn't matter, any generic clone was fine, as they all ran MS-DOS. The gold standard compatibility test for the day was the ability to run Microsoft Flight Simulator. Turbo Pascal was a cheap, fast, and productive platform. The printed manual, built-in help and libraries were awesome. Hitting F1 on almost any bit of source got you help that included a working example of the thing you were trying out. [Edit] What made the IBM-PC clones amazing was the shareware scene, you could get any programming language you wanted under the sun, with a bunch of libraries, for $2 at your local computer club, and it was all pretty good stuff. That massive wave of programs that just worked was astounding. Check out the Internet Archive, there's almost everything from SimTel, etc.
- amichail 4y ago
  But many people in the 80s had computers that were not PC compatible.
  - simonblack 4y ago
    They would normally be called 'Home Computers' in that era before the 'PC' and during the 8-bit to 16-bit changeover, say from 1975 to about 1985. CP/M was the main OS back then. At that time the two technical categories were the 8-bit systems which had been around for about 7 years (CP/M machines, S100-bus machines, apple 6502 machines, 6800 machines, Z80 systems such as TRS-80, Sinclair, etc) and the newer 16-bit 'PC' market which was originally slanted towards Business, especially with price-tags of 6-10 thousand dollars.
- anyfoo 4y ago
  I think you misunderstand. Even back then, "PC" meant anything that roughly meant "MS-DOS compatible". (There was the stronger "IBM compatible", but you could usually get very far even on "non-compatibles", so those were still called a "PC".) However, there was a multitude of completely different systems that had nothing to do with MS-DOS (or an x86-derived CPU) whatsoever: C64, Amiga, Atari ST, Amstrad/Schneider CPC and countless others. Some of them would maybe run CP/M. At least from some point in the 80s on, they would usually not be called "PCs".

2 points by amichail 4y ago

Would you have got one if you could have afforded it at the time?

My parents bought a TRS-80 Coco for $400 in 1981. I had the power supply burn out and then replaced it with a Coco 3 as soon as the Coco 3 came out. Around 1987 I switched to a 286 PC that cost $1200 inclusive of a monochrome monitor, a 1.2 MB floppy drive and a hard drive. When I add up everything I spent on the Coco (2 disk drives, disk controller, multi pack, UART serial card, music card, Tandy branded tape deck, joysticks, special monitor, software, modem, ..) it added up to more than what I spent on my first PC, With the Coco I learned to program in BASIC, Assembly and C. I also wrote my own FORTH. The 286 was crazy fast and affordable to alternatives like the Mac 2. Turbo Pascal was my favorite language to work with on the PC, but I switched to C when I went to college because it was portable to Sun workstations. In terms of performance a good 286 machine beat the pants off the old 8-bit machines: my first experience using a software emulator was writing BASIC programs for a CP/M system under an emulator that ran faster than a real Z-80 computer.

dave4420 4y ago

No, because you had to pay extra for Turbo Pascal. Most PCs came with GW Basic. Most home computers came with some dialect of Basic. If you didn’t already know how to program, why would you pay extra for Turbo Pascal?

amichail 4y ago
Turbo Pascal is a better intro to programming than Basic — especially Basic dialects without built-in graphics commands.
- dave4420 4y ago
  But if you had yet to learn to program… would you know that?

mikewarot 4y ago

It really didn't matter, any generic clone was fine, as they all ran MS-DOS. The gold standard compatibility test for the day was the ability to run Microsoft Flight Simulator. Turbo Pascal was a cheap, fast, and productive platform. The printed manual, built-in help and libraries were awesome. Hitting F1 on almost any bit of source got you help that included a working example of the thing you were trying out. [Edit] What made the IBM-PC clones amazing was the shareware scene, you could get any programming language you wanted under the sun, with a bunch of libraries, for $2 at your local computer club, and it was all pretty good stuff. That massive wave of programs that just worked was astounding. Check out the Internet Archive, there's almost everything from SimTel, etc.

amichail 4y ago
But many people in the 80s had computers that were not PC compatible.
- simonblack 4y ago
  They would normally be called 'Home Computers' in that era before the 'PC' and during the 8-bit to 16-bit changeover, say from 1975 to about 1985. CP/M was the main OS back then. At that time the two technical categories were the 8-bit systems which had been around for about 7 years (CP/M machines, S100-bus machines, apple 6502 machines, 6800 machines, Z80 systems such as TRS-80, Sinclair, etc) and the newer 16-bit 'PC' market which was originally slanted towards Business, especially with price-tags of 6-10 thousand dollars.
anyfoo 4y ago
I think you misunderstand. Even back then, "PC" meant anything that roughly meant "MS-DOS compatible". (There was the stronger "IBM compatible", but you could usually get very far even on "non-compatibles", so those were still called a "PC".) However, there was a multitude of completely different systems that had nothing to do with MS-DOS (or an x86-derived CPU) whatsoever: C64, Amiga, Atari ST, Amstrad/Schneider CPC and countless others. Some of them would maybe run CP/M. At least from some point in the 80s on, they would usually not be called "PCs".