Monday, November 29, 1999
Scotts Valley, CA

Turbo Pascal 1.0 - 16 Years Old

With the release of Turbo Pascal 1.0, Borland started its award winning push into the world of development environments and tools. Borland licensed the Pascal compiler core, written by Anders Hejlsberg (Poly Data was the name of his company in Denmark), and added the user interface and editor. Borland also became best known and loved by end users with the release of SideKick the Desktop Organizer. What was Borland all about? Anders says it best. "No white knights, no geniuses, just a bunch of enthusiastic guys doing what seemed like a good idea."

The user interface was small and simple: a compiler, a text editor, and a runtime environment. The image to the left shows the main user interface screen. Also notice the use of only 64kb of memory!

A few statistics about Turbo Pascal 1.0:

• it shipped on a single floppy disk (8" and 5 1/4" CPM, 5 1/4" DOS)


• the size of the .com file based compiler was 33k bytes


• the total size of the files on the floppy disk was 131,297 bytes


• the example program was a spreadsheet demo

Turbo Pascal 1.0 is available for free download in the museum on our community site. You'll find the Turbo Pascal 1.0 zip file at http://community.borland.com/museum/borland/software/TP1.zip. (Note: you must be a community member to access the museum.)

Delphi 5 - the modern way to build applications

Development and developers have come a long way in the last 16 years. With Delphi 5 developers have a modern RAD development environment that allows us to build a range of applications (Windows, Internet, Multi-Tier, etc.), COM and CORBA servers, and components. And yes, we can even build simple command line programs just like we could with Turbo Pascal 1.0.

Happy Hacking