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Comment by mobilio | Hacker News Reader

I started with TP 5.5...

My uni had two micros halls, one with 5.0, the other with 5.5. What's the difference? I asked. It turns out the 5.5 had some new shit called "Object Oriented Programming"... and a Breakout clone to illustrate the paradigm.

At some moment Borland released, free as in beer, the 3 and 5 versions. Binaries should be out there somewhere for those curious.

I'm sure young people would be surprised to see what 5.5 provided. The on-screen help was amazing: cut and paste useful examples from the help of many functions. And the instantaneous compiling... :)

Ha, thanks for refreshing my memory that it was 5.5 that added OOP!

I started with 4.0, so that's my baseline. Then 5.0 added overlays (IIRC) and 6.0 introduced Turbo Vision, which was a kind of magic to me :).

It's interesting how a _programming language/IDE_ can bring such warm feelings.

I remember I learned Turbo Vision and OOP in general by writing my own Turbo Vision equivalent for the graphics mode (vs. text-only). Good times!

That's very cool! IIRC I tried to write a very simple Turbo Vision clone (or subset) but I couldn't fully comprehend how the nested widget initialization worked. I mean, I knew the last parameter was a pointer to the next widget, and so on and on, but somehow I couldn't "integrate" everything in my brain :).

Overlays were already included in version 3.0.

Yeah, for some reason I thought it was 5.0.

Do you remember if there was any major language feature added in 5.0? I couldn't quickly find anything concrete..

Sorry, I don't remember, but I found the manuals! https://bitsavers.org/pdf/borland/turbo_pascal/

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