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TurboPascal had a lovely IDE which made it really nice for teaching. Whereas teaching Java was a struggle initially for novices because of the relative difficulty in configuring the development environment. This is probably the most important thing PHP also got right for beginners.

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I also learned programming in college with TurboPascal and absolutely loved it. Learning Smalltalk was also a pleasure due to not only the beauty of its concepts but also the development environment. The closest thing in Java for teaching the language is BlueJ, which gives the student a good intuition on the difference between class affordances (constructors, static methods and variables) and object affordances (instance methods) based on what's available when you right-click on them.

TurboC and Borland C had the same kind of IDE.

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