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Delphi was years ahead of it's time. I remember coding a patient data entry system (for the VA) and submitting machine learning college courses.

Always got pushback, but it was quite maintainable code and it ran fast.

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I'm a programmer today because someone gave me a pirated copy of Delphi (6?). Sorry Borland!

See also another interesting discussion on Delphi here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7613543

I started programming "for real" with Turbo Pascal (5.5 probably) while in high school. It was easy to copy it for personal use from there. Although later I actually went and bought Borland Pascal 7.0, a big and fairly expensive box with the disks and lots of books inside. I think I wanted it to be able to create Windows applications, but ended up hating Windows, so really only utilized a little of its potential..

I saved my money and bought a copy of Turbo C. Before that, I used both Basic (first on the TI 99/4A then on QBasic) and Pascal (on computers in schools) with some Logo, Icon, and later AutoLisp (for AutoCAD).

I really liked Pascal and I always thought it was somewhat unfortunate it didn't survive outside of a small programming niche.

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