>>Wasn't Turbo Pascal the real groundbreaker from Borland?
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>Yep - bought it for my CP/M system. Compile and link in one operation. Small enough to fit on a single 240K 8" floppy, with space left over for your programs. So you didn't have to swap disks between your user files and the compiler/linker.
>
>A friend had a copy of Microsoft Pascal for CP/M, which came on multiple floppies for both the compile and link steps. You had to swap floppies a bunch of times to compile and link. And it was brutally slow compared to Turbo Pascal.

I was working on a CP/M machine for a year or two, and had Turbo Pascal and Microsoft Cobol. Their relative speeds were about one order of magnitude. And I had to write a sort (yes, SORT) in TP to compensate for the M$Cobol's bug when the indexes would go bananas after 32767 records. I did it in a day and saved the day - to my boss's astonishment. He thought I was halfway between crazy and brave, neither of which were something to be admired in a programmer.

TP knit circles around anything else I had on CP/M.