Yes, Turbo Pascal was a great one (which led to Turbo C, and then the great line of IDE compilers). Borland and Phillippe K were great forces in this industry. And they had great respect for the software world. If memory serves me, Borland filed a "friend of the court" brief in the famous Fox/Ashton-Tate lawsuit (of course, siding with Fox).

Actually, Microsoft C was one of the big compilers in the 1980's (along with Watcom C and a few others). When Turbo C came out in 1987, Microsoft C was up to 4.0 and had their source-level debugger (Codeview). While Microsoft C didn't have as many frills as Turbo C, it still came out on top on most of the optimization/performance benchmarks.

I loved Sidekick. It was awesome.

I've never owned or used a Mac - so while I know about products like Jazz, I never had the chance to use them.

I still love today's new products. SQL 2005 has some cool language features, VS2005 is much better than VS2003 - but there will never be a time like 15-20 years ago, when you couldn't wait for your copy of DataBased Advisor and Dr. Dobb's Journal to come in the mail.



Kevin