Depending on the time frame, FreePascal/Lazarus might have simply been not available (or unknown) to the team. I remember how in ~1997 at a science camp we use

Depending on the time frame, FreePascal/Lazarus might have simply been not available (or unknown) to the team. I remember how in ~1997 at a science camp we used Turbo Pascal under DOS for most programming labs, and whenever pascal code was run on Linux machines we used p2c translator and compiled the resulting C code.