>>>>One of the "it almost happened but didn't moments" was in the late 1980's when Borland was seriously looking at a Turbo dBase to complement their Turbo product line. But Phil K just didn't think there was enough justification - he though client-server would have more emphasis.
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>>>Turbo Pascal's compiler was fantastic. Turbo Dbase would be interesting...
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>>Turbo Pascal and Turbo C were outstanding products. Microsoft C might have had a few more optimization tricks up its sleeve, but Turbo C was overall a better crafted product.
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>>By late 1989 the PC world had 2 stellar five star products - Turbo C and FoxPro 1.0. As much as I love SQL Server, I would say those 2 products , with respect to their era, were the greatest software releases we've seen.
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>I have to agree with Turbo Pascal. At a time when compilers sold for hundreds of dollars, Borland sold it for, what,49 bucks? And it was a good product. It was a game changer.

And due to its low price as well as relatively good performance (not only quick compile, but the generated code wasn't too bad -- perhaps not optimal, but decent), it replaced BASIC as the favorite language of hobbyist computing. First used Turbo Pascal under CP/M. Ah, the simple days, when a single 5.25" floppy diskette could be bootable, contain the compiler, and some workspace (admittedly a bit tight on space on a double-sided double-density disk -- dual floppy operation was recommended). Of course depending on the size of programs you were building, the limitations associated with .COM format certainly became an irritant. Sure overlay groups helped to a degree, but due to how you had to organize your code (adjacent procedures and functions would be swapped -- meaning that you had to organize your code with unrelated code adjacent to each other), it soon became very clumsy with larger programs. Cheered when Turbo Pascal 4 came out -- it allowed you to not only compile to EXE, but allowed you to have separately-compiled modules (in earlier versions you had to resort to having a bunch of include files -- and the program got big enough, the compile times could get long -- had one program where compile time was about 15~20 minutes).