To quote Joel Spolsky: One day, a spiffy program called Compas Pascal appeared from Denmark, which Philippe Kahn bought and renamed Borland Turbo Pascal. Turbo

To quote Joel Spolsky: One day, a spiffy program called Compas Pascal appeared from Denmark, which Philippe Kahn bought and renamed Borland Turbo Pascal. Turbo Pascal was sort of shocking, since it basically did everything that IBM Pascal did, only it ran in about 33K of memory including the text editor. This was nothing short of astonishing. Even more astonishing was the fact that you could compile a small program in less than one second. It’s as if a company you had never heard of introduced a clone of the Buick LeSabre which could go 1,000,000 MPH and drive around the world on so little gasoline than an ant could drink it without getting sick.