← Back to context

Comment by lmz

15 hours ago

Turbo Pascal was not freeware when it was new.

It did have a remarkably low price, though - less than a tenth of UCSD p-System or Topspeed. Even the competitors in the hobbyist space like the original IBM/Microsoft Pascal and DRI's Pascal/MT originally cost 4-5x as much.

Really, it was responsible for as big a step change in pricing of programming tools in the 1980s as GNU, BSD, and Linux were in the 90s.

True. I never paid for it myself, but I think i got it from my uni. I had some of my fondest coding memories with it