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

My first machine was a used Apple //e with a Z80 card and a RAM card (with a WHOLE 1meg of RAM). I would boot to RAMDisk C:, load TP AND my working files to C: and I was cooking along at machine speed. Ran a (dog) pedigree program that I had written for quite a while. Then came assembler class and my instructor couldn't read the 8080 code. C'mon, there's not THAT much difference between JUM and JMP.