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Comment by bbarn | Hacker News Reader

Turbo Pascal was the first software I remember buying in a retail box. Before then it was all copied and school-given software, but something in 15 year old me really felt it was worth buying this tool.

It was. That purchase spawned a career out of my evening hobby. Then, a few years later, when I was mostly using C or VB, and only firing up Pascal for fun now and then, Delphi came out. I was super excited. Until I realized I could barely use it, and none of my local book stores had anything on it that was helpful to read.

By the time the internet came along, and I got into full time development.. .net was out, with "academic" pricing for VS 2003. That purchase brought me real jobs, at real companies.

So, for me.. Borland got me curious, got me hooked, then I switched to tools that got me money. Maybe that's because the ecosystem had changed, but I can't be the only one.

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You sound like me. 15 years old and Turbo Pascal was a mind blowing experience for me. Especially in the graphics arena. UCSD physics department hired me to convert their particle collision vector data (Monte Carlo calculations) into a 3D graphics representation. That was a hell of an experience for me.

> By the time the internet came along, and I got into full time development.. .net was out, with "academic" pricing for VS 2003.

The web was around for about decade before Microsoft .NET arrived. In fact I remember coding Delphi in an evaluation copy of the IDE given away on a cover CD from .Net magazine (not to be confused with Microsoft .NET). And then a few years later downloading a pirated copy of a beta release of Visual Studio .NET.

It was actually the web that introduced me to Borland's Windows IDEs. I'd used Turbo Pascal extensively, but then got hooked on Visual Studio once I migrated away from DOS. Then I started seeing talk of these Borland development environments for Windows and thought "I love TP, so why not give these a shot". I actually much preferred those IDE's to Visual Studio as well, but alas my career and personal interest was switching to non-Windows technologies at that point and thus I never really found a practical use for Borland's Windows compilers.

A few years back I did need to throw together a basic Windows app for some clients, but by that point Delphi was dead and I'd forgotten a lot of Pascal's nuances anyway. So I ended up knocking up something in VB.NET; which was actually less painful than I remembered from the .NET 1.0 days. In fact almost pleasurable. But for all of Pascal / Delphi's warts, I did very much prefer that language over any of the iterations of Visual Basic. In fact I think I'd probably go further and say I preferred it over C/C++ as well.

Actually I remember that Delphi was way more advanced on the TCP/IP side compared to Visual Basic. I remember downloading (for free) quite complete TCP/IP VCLs that included http, ftp, icmp etc.. compared to VB that had nothing (at least for free).

VB and VB.NET are different languages. But yeah, Delphi ran circles around VB in nearly every measurable way. I don't think anyone would seriously argue that VB6 was a better language nor had the better tooling. And earlier versions of VB would have only compared even worse.

As for what libraries VB had for networking, there was some HTTP OCX that was bundled with Internet Explorer (and I don't mean the Trident renderer), which was awful. But aside that, there was only a basic wrapper around the Winsock C libraries. To be fair, the Winsock OCX was pretty decent fot what it was, but you were left to write all the host layers (OSI) for yourself.

I once rewrote around 200-300 lines of VB using the WinInet gear into a 20-30 line Perl script with WWW::Mechanize. VB's HTTP stuff was terrible.

Indeed. So much so that I found it was easier just writing my own HTTP classes on top of Winsock.

But to be fair, we are talking the 90s and HTTP wasn't as ingrained into technologies as it is today. Heck, back then parameterised SQL hadn't been invented; Internet Explorer was basically the only browser (Netscape had largely been crushed and Opera was non-free); most computers still shipped DOS (if just as a bootloader); and classic ASP was a popular server side framework. So it's easy to be critical with hindsight but the whole ecosystem was still maturing.

I am fully aware VB and VB.NET are two different languages :) Actually at the time I am talking about, .NET has not been invented yet (wikipedia says 2012), and it was invented by the guy cited in this thread as ex chief dev of Delphi:

My post was just to say that Delphi had quite advanced TCP/IP components options compared to other languages of that time (I cited VB because it was supposed to be the "easiest" language of the period)

> Actually at the time I am talking about, .NET has not been invented yet (wikipedia says 2012)

I assume you mean 2002? FYI .NET was available to some developers before 2002, that was just the first non-beta release :)

> I am fully aware VB and VB.NET are two different languages...I cited VB because it was supposed to be the "easiest" language of the period

I mistook your post to reference Visual Basic because I mentioned it in my post where I discussed VB.NET. I say this because opening your post with "actually" suggested you meant your reply as a correction to my comment. So it wasn't clear to me that your post was intended purely as an interesting yet tangential anecdote.

Pretty similar today.

Had used Turbo Pascal 3, 5.5. and 6 for MS-DOS, followed by Turbo C 2.0 and Turbo C++ 1.0.

Eventually I got around buying TPW 1.5 and Turbo C++ for Windows for personal use.

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