[redprince]

> Turbo Pascal was in the running with assembly language for my favorite language to program the IBM PC in the 1980s.

Teaching myself programming as a kid in the late 80s I encountered the limits of BASIC and then Turbo BASIC pretty soon. Everyone I knew was dabbling in Turbo Pascal but for some reason I can't really recall I rented K&R at the local library and went for Turbo C. I got an incredible amount of mileage out of that decision.

Learning x86 assembly was par for the course back then. Everything was so slow and that was the way to get everything out of the machine. I even remember me going to some length dabbling with the timer for the CPU hogging DRAM refresh cycle to squeeze out the last few percent of CPU power that poor 8086 had. Basically moving away from the conservative settings towards a point where the DRAM was just not becoming "forgetful".

[PaulHoule]

I saw Pascal on the VAX (sucked) in school before I really got into Turbo.

I saw C before I started using Turbo because I had a C compiler for the 6809 using this Unix-clone OS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-9

on a TRS-80 Color Computer and I was checking out the K&R C book and also the AT&T UNIX manual from the public library a lot: I had a project of implementing many of the "software tools" such as wc for OS-9 as well as developing tools compatible with ones people were using on CP/M bulletin boards like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LBR_(file_format)

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQ_(program)

(Now I tried that last one in Microsoft BASIC and boy the bit handling was painful)

[hobotime]

OS-9 was a gateway for a lot of good developers. Constrained (8/16-Bit) enough to make you think but having a lot of the tools and ideas from mainframe/Unix world.