Turbo Pascal

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Stands for: Borland's $49.95 Pascal compiler and editor of 20 November 1983, by Anders Hejlsberg

Borland's software development system of 20 November 1983, a Pascal compiler with an integrated editor for CP/M, CP/M-86 and MS-DOS, written by Anders Hejlsberg, famous for compiling very fast and for selling by mail order at $49.95 when professional tools cost hundreds.

Turbo Pascal is a compiler and integrated development environment for Pascal, originally developed by Anders Hejlsberg at Borland and notable for its very fast compiling; with the later Turbo C it made Borland a leader in PC development tools. Philippe Kahn's idea was to package everything a programmer needed, a custom text editor, the compiler and the means to produce an executable, in one integrated toolkit with much better performance and resource use than the professional tools of the day, and to sell it by direct mail order for US$49.95 without retailers or resellers, when vendors aimed their tools at professionals and the price of a basic set plus a profiler ran into the hundreds of dollars. The compiler descends from the Blue Label Pascal Hejlsberg wrote in 1981 for the Nascom microcomputer's NasSys cassette system; Borland licensed the PolyPascal core from his Danish company Poly Data, added the user interface and editor, and after a release as Compas Pascal for CP/M shipped Turbo Pascal on 20 November 1983 for CP/M, CP/M-86 and DOS. Hejlsberg joined Borland and was the architect of every version of the compiler and of the first three versions of Delphi, before going on to C# and .NET at Microsoft. Object-oriented features arrived with 5.5; by 1995 Delphi replaced it.

What was new. In 1983 writing a program meant an editor, then a compiler, then a linker, each a separate program loaded in turn from floppy disks, and vendors of development tools aimed their products at professional developers at professional prices. Kahn's idea, in the encyclopaedia's words, was to package all these functions in an integrated programming toolkit designed to have much better performance and resource utilisation than the usual professional development tools, and to charge a low price for a package integrating a custom text editor, compiler and all functionality needed to produce executable programs. The program was sold by direct mail order for US$49.95, without going through established sales channels. Fast compilation was the experience: the compiler was in memory with the editor, an error dropped the cursor on the line, and the cycle that had taken minutes took seconds.

Lineage. The Turbo Pascal compiler was based on the Blue Label Pascal compiler Anders Hejlsberg produced in 1981 for the NasSys cassette-based operating system of the Nascom microcomputer. Borland licensed Hejlsberg's PolyPascal compiler core, Poly Data being the name of his company in Denmark, and added the user interface and editor; the compiler was first released as Compas Pascal for CP/M and then, on 20 November 1983, as Turbo Pascal for CP/M, including the Apple II with a Z-80 SoftCard and the Commodore 64 with a CP/M cartridge, for CP/M-86 and for DOS. Hejlsberg joined the company as an employee and was the architect for all versions of the Turbo Pascal compiler and the first three versions of Borland Delphi.

Versions. From version 5.5 object-oriented programming features were introduced, classes, inheritance, constructors and destructors; Borland called its language Object Pascal, greatly extended later as the language underlying Delphi. For versions 6 and 7, the last two, a lower-priced Turbo Pascal and a more expensive Borland Pascal were sold, the latter oriented to professional development with more libraries and standard library source code, and Borland Pascal 7 had Windows support. By 1995 Borland had dropped Turbo and Borland Pascal and replaced them with the rapid application development environment Delphi, based on Object Pascal. Borland later released several versions as freeware once they became 'antique software': 1.0 for DOS on 1 February 2000, 3.02 on 10 February 2000, 5.5 on 21 February 2002 and the French 7.01 in 2000; most are still downloadable from the successor site at Embarcadero.

Why it is remembered. The 1985 West Coast Computer Faire review quoted on the Borland record said the legend of Turbo Pascal had reached mythic proportions, with firms planning in marketing meetings to become the next Borland. The reason is in the price and the loop: a professional's instrument made cheap enough for a student, and a compile fast enough to learn by. A great many network engineers of the author's generation wrote their first real programs in it, and the structured habits Pascal taught travelled into every configuration they wrote afterwards. The Pascal entry carries the language; the Borland record on the industry timeline carries the company from this compiler to Micro Focus.

Also known as: turbo pascal 3, turbo pascal 5.5, turbo pascal 7, borland pascal, hejlsberg, compas pascal

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