The true Turbo Pascal Story - Felix John COLIBRI.

• abstract : here comes the true story about the creation of Turbo Pascal
  
• key words : history - Turbo Pascal - Anders Heljsberg
  

The Turbo Pascal Scoop

Yesterday he presented a post from Lars Frid-Nielsen titled

    "Memories of Turbo Pascal version 1.0 - Lars Frid-Nielsen, Denmark"

telling about the creation of Turbo Pascal. I tried to add a comment, but was thrown out with:

Ok, fine. "Sk2 second chance php" ? This must be some private joke. But that's totally irrelevant.

What IS important is Lars's story. Please read it, it will really tell you how things happened. I've been waiting for nearly 20 years now, to have this insider story. I have no personal connection to Borland (DevCon / Codegear / Embarcadero or whatever) to just sit down over a beer, and ask how it really happened. And neither Philippe KAHN nor Anders HELJSBERG have published anything about it. But Lars tells it all. Here is the link again:

    Memories of Turbo Pascal version 1.0 - Lars Frid-Nielsen, Denmark

For the record, here are my 2 cents I tried to add as a comment to David I's blog

Wow ! that's the first time I read the TRUE inside story about Turbo Pascal. THAT's a scoop. Like David I, I started on the Apple ][ back in december 79, then, in 83, on the PC, had to use all kind of substitutes (UCSD, the $19.95 JRT, the Moscow Compiler, you name it, and THEN, wow, Turbo. I still have the Turbo 1 blue book somewhere). I knew about this 12K RT / 8K wordstar-like editor / 4K menu and 12 K compiler structure, since I did look at Turbo 3 VERY, VERY closely. Recursive descent in assembler, I could'nt believe it. The only thing they totally missed was the UNIT concept. This "overlay" stuff Lars is talking about was a strange idea. On a 64K Apple ][, we could swap the compiler, the editor, the filer, the loader, and on a 192K IBM Pc you had to use "overlays" ?. Annyway, with Turbo 4 we finally had the UNITS. Which led us to the abstract data types, well, the objects ! Very nice idea, David, to let people tell their personal story. We all invested so much in Turbo Pascal and we do love coding like an addiction ... So, obviously, we're only too happy to talk about it. Anyway, reading Lars's article sure made my day

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