Turbo Pascal wasn't my introduction to programming, but it was where I started to find my way. The edit, compile, test was factors of magnitude faster than any other compilers.

Like the post says, it was very small, even for the time. The editor + compiler was smaller than most text editors and many non-programmers would use it as a word processor. At a time when a lot of systems only had 160KB floppy drives (and no hard-drive), the size made a difference.

One great feature I remember was you could add inline assembler for things that needed to be faster (my IBM clone processor was only 4.77MHz). I spent hours shaving cycles off my Conway's Life program that was half Pascal and half assembler.