>The pace of innovation in those days was ferocious. It makes today's progress look evolutionary at best; trivial or marketing-driven/"tyranny of small differences" at worst.
>
>I subscribed to Byte mag and would pick up copies of DDJ on the newsstand if something exciting or exotic caught my eye. Sometimes it felt like you could learn more from reading one issue of either of those than from a semester of any computer course of the day.
>
>The ads were almost as interesting as the articles - long-forgotten products with (at the time) revolutionary potential.
>
>The best 1.0 product I ever used was Borland Turbo Pascal 1.0 for CP/M.


I agree, Byte and DDJ were great magazines. One of my inspirations for my Baker's Dozen series in CODE magazine was Al Stevens' column in DDJ

Other great magazines at the time were Computer Language and DB Advisor. Jeff Duntemann's magazines (Turbo/PC Techniques) were great, and certainly FPA and FoxTalk were highly valuable for all of us.

I wasn't a serious Pascal programmer and I never worked on CP/M - but yes, Turbo Pascal was an amazing product. I'll always wonder how the xBase world would have changed if Borland had created "Turbo dBase" - but given the somewhat flippant remarks that Philippe Kahn made in interviews about the possibility, it was obvious that he didn't quite believe in the concept (or....he saw the speed of Fox and changed his mind)

You're right - some of the ad products were huge at the time. I used an xBase product called Genifer - provided great structure for applications.

Yes, the pace of innovation was tremendous. Yes, I'm biased, and so I think the progress in SQL Server from 2005 to today is tremendous. But that pace of innovation in the late 1980's is something we might never see again.