January 03, 2005
IDEs, circa 1986
Being bored while waiting for Visual Studio .NET 2003 to install, I got the idea to try out whether Turbo Pascal 3.0, a state-of-the-art integrated development environment from 1986, would run on my XP system. Fortunately, Borland made the antique software available to the public free of charge, so I downloaded it (a whopping 170209 bytes), unpacked it, and, much to my surprise, it ran on my Windows XP system - at lightning speed. Imagine a complete IDE running from the CPU cache. Like one would expect, compiling even the largest sample programs takes just fractions of a second (what would take minutes back then).
The IDE actually came in three versions - one using software floating point operations, one for the 8087, and one using BCD arithmetics for financial applications.
Click the above image to see all files included on the original diskette.
The 39 K TURBO.COM executable includes the editor, compiler and runtime system. Note the question whether to include the error messages. One could gain a few additional KBytes for source code editing and compiling by leaving the error messages out (numerical error codes would be displayed instead). Those were the days...
Posted by guenter at January 3, 2005 08:25 PM