4 ms·

Yes, to anyone who was there the difference between computing in 1980 vs 1989 is night and day. Personal computing changed completely and you really either want

by kurthr 3y ago

Yes, to anyone who was there the difference between computing in 1980 vs 1989 is night and day. Personal computing changed completely and you really either wanted assembly or BASIC (OK Fourth if you're kinky) in the early 80s with 4k of RAM... because that's what other people had. TurboPascal was released about '84, but I didn't see anyone using it until '86. I feel like Pascal was a nice gateway into C from Fortran/BASIC, but it arrived so late I'm not sure it was really efficient in terms of learning.

lucas_membrane 3y ago
In 1986 and early 1987, PC's did not have more than 640kb of RAM, just about all the programming tools for IBM PC's were limited to 64kb program size, and there were all kinds of really mickey-mouse ways to try to get around those limits. There were 80286 computers that could use 16 MB without too much trouble, but in 1987 programming tools that could use the full 640 kb of the 8086 and link separately compiled code showed up (e.g. Turbo Pascal 4.0), the same year the the 32-bit 80386 desktop PC's were launched. Borland's Pascal and Delphi pretty much matched the capabilities of Microsoft's C and C++ through those first disorienting years of change.