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Comment by pcwalton | Hacker News Reader

Well, DOS (by which I really mean the IBM PC) was arguably more "powerful" than Unix minicomputers of the time, in that there was never any OS sitting between you and the hardware. Compared to say, an iPad, it was a very developer-friendly machine.

Turbo Pascal, in particular, more or less introduced an entire generation to programming, especially since it had no copy protection.

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I owe my entire career to GWBASIC, QBasic, and Turbo Pascal, all of which was done from an IBM PC. When I first discovered UNIX by way of Red Hat Linux I was utterly confused: all of those absurdly named directories in my root! And where were the executables? I remember pecking out some C in nano, compiling it, and then wondering how the hell you turn a.out into a.exe.

Yes. My first line of code was written in that primitive BASIC that came with the Commodore 64. But my first real program which did something useful -- a game, what else -- was written in GWBASIC.

I owe everything to DOS and GWBASIC.

Well, for disk access, it certainly was an OS. As for more powerful? Nah. Not sure how anyone could make that case given that the Unices of the time were already multi-user multi-tasking systems. Given the hardware DOS ran on, it had to be as small as it was, because the hardware itself didn't have the juice or the architecture to handle multitasking. When the hardware improved, multitasking became a necessity, and thus the need for more hardware abstraction, etc., in other words, a full OS.

Turbo Pascal was beautiful. Never quite understood why the industry chose C++.

Because TP only ran on DOS. C++ ran on diverse machines. C++ was also an open standard that anyone could (and did) implement.

I remember phoning up AT&T's lawyer to ask him if I could get permission to implement a C++ compiler, and call it C++. He laughed, and thanked me for asking, saying nobody else had bothered :-) I've always had warm feelings towards AT&T based on that experience.

Turbo Pascal 5.5 (the first version implementing Object Pascal and thus could be compared to C++ as opposed to C) was only on DOS indeed, but practically everyone was there and Turbo Pascal for Windows was released in 1991 just when Windows was taking off. But ignoring Turbo Pascal, Object Pascal was already implemented in Macintosh by both Apple (who got Niklaus Wirth to assist in designing the object oriented extensions) and others (most notably Think Pascal).

Of course these weren't standardized and had slight differences in their syntax, but at the time C++ wasn't standardized either and - again - not all compilers were compatible.

I think the main reason that C++ got its hold was that it was compatible with C which itself got its hold over other similar languages because the popular OSes of the time used it and provided headers in C, all documentation was about the C interface and most third party stuff hooked up with C. Borland initially tried to Pascal-ize the C bits of Windows (f.e. they converted the function declarations from C to Pascal in the Windows SDK docs they distributed up until and including Delphi 1) but eventually gave up (Delphi 2's Windows API docs use C syntax).

Of course that was up to early-90s. After that it was mainly Borland who used Pascal and they succumbed to Enterprise Envy, constantly and it wouldn't be until Free Pascal released version 1.0 years later (in 2000) that a competent 3rd party implementation would exist - and even that was mostly ignored until people started noticing Lazarus in very recent years. Of course now is too late to change the tide as no matter what a Pascal compiler may provide, most people have a ton of preconceived notions about the language.

If I may brag a bit, Zortech C++ was the tipping point for C++ adoption. Before ZTC++, C++ and Objective-C were neck and neck. But OC required a license from Stepstone to implement it, and C++ did not. ZTC++ was the first native, cheap, fast and effective compiler for DOS. I agree with you that DOS was where the action was in 1987. ZTC++'s debut was immediately followed by a veritable explosion of C++ articles in magazines, followed of course by its use.

Since ZTC++ was not a proprietary language, people felt confident to use it on DOS and use cfront elsewhere (and the nascent g++).

The success of ZTC++ directly caused Borland to do Turbo C++, followed by Microsoft C++, and other languages were simply left in the dust.

No OS between you and the hardware may not be more "powerful". Yes, you can do anything you want. That makes it powerful. But you have to do everything yourself. That... not so much.

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