* the machine I ran Turbo Pascal on had a 115meg hard drive which was large compared to my co-workers 80meg drives.
* Turbo Pascal could not edit or display Chinese, Japanese, Korean.
* The editor could not search and replace across files with undo like my current editor. Nor do I think it could do a regex IIRC.
* It could not tag 40k+ files and bring up help on any function in near realtime.
* It could not refactor code.
* The machine ran in 80x50 characters. No windows. I could not view both reference material and my code at the some time on the machine, I needed a book. If I didn't have the book I needed I had to either go to a library or find a tech bookstore. (I only new of 3 in all of both Northern and Southern Califorina).
* The machine I ran it on had no networking.
* I had to manually edit config.sys, autoexec.bat and move DIP switches when ever any new devices were added. There was no USB only serial and parallel.
* When my program crashes I often had to reboot the machine.
* There were no fonts, everything was text.
* There were no images except a few icons in my apps. No way to easily display a company logo or screenshots in docs.
* There were few if any libraries. If I needed to read an image or parse a file I had to write it from scratch. If I needed to draw some graphics I had to poke registers. If I wanted to play audio I had to do device specific stuff.
I'm sure we could go on listing all the things those machines did not do nor did Turbo Pascal do compared to today's environments with their large libraries and access to all the stuff we've built up today.
Sure I miss the time when I could basically own the entire machine but I'm happy that today I can just plug in a USB stick or a digital camera and they just work. That I can participate internationally in multiple languages. That 1-20meg images are trivial to manipulate and display. That mp3s, wavs, and other audio is ubiquitous, etc....
Those simple days were fun but a little reflection will show that today's supposed complexity has made it easy to take a lot of things for granted. In the Turbo pascal days. If you wanted to display a photo it would take hundreds or thousands of lines of code, especially if you wanted it to work for more that just your machine. Today it's step 1: copy file from camera, step 2 <img src="path/to/file.jpg" />
Although I used it in the early nineties, I had a much different experience than you mention. TP had Turbo Vision, a very usable windowing library. You could open code in one window and help in another ... hotkeys opened up the help on the current word etc.
I also dialed into BBSs and downloaded .gifs of elle macpherson, so plenty to do. All on a 386/40. I moved up to a 486/40 at some point.
A comparison to Lightspeed Pascal (which was not quite so small but well under 400kB) might be more instructive. (Or Mac Pascal -- an interpreted Pascal IDE available on the Mac even earlier.) It had a proper GUI, could (theoretically) have been localized by editing resources, had undo (one level) and find/replace, the Mac was networked from day one, and so on.
That said:
* the machine I ran Turbo Pascal on had a 115meg hard drive which was large compared to my co-workers 80meg drives.
* Turbo Pascal could not edit or display Chinese, Japanese, Korean.
* The editor could not search and replace across files with undo like my current editor. Nor do I think it could do a regex IIRC.
* It could not tag 40k+ files and bring up help on any function in near realtime.
* It could not refactor code.
* The machine ran in 80x50 characters. No windows. I could not view both reference material and my code at the some time on the machine, I needed a book. If I didn't have the book I needed I had to either go to a library or find a tech bookstore. (I only new of 3 in all of both Northern and Southern Califorina).
* The machine I ran it on had no networking.
* I had to manually edit config.sys, autoexec.bat and move DIP switches when ever any new devices were added. There was no USB only serial and parallel.
* When my program crashes I often had to reboot the machine.
* There were no fonts, everything was text.
* There were no images except a few icons in my apps. No way to easily display a company logo or screenshots in docs.
* There were few if any libraries. If I needed to read an image or parse a file I had to write it from scratch. If I needed to draw some graphics I had to poke registers. If I wanted to play audio I had to do device specific stuff.
I'm sure we could go on listing all the things those machines did not do nor did Turbo Pascal do compared to today's environments with their large libraries and access to all the stuff we've built up today.
Sure I miss the time when I could basically own the entire machine but I'm happy that today I can just plug in a USB stick or a digital camera and they just work. That I can participate internationally in multiple languages. That 1-20meg images are trivial to manipulate and display. That mp3s, wavs, and other audio is ubiquitous, etc....
Those simple days were fun but a little reflection will show that today's supposed complexity has made it easy to take a lot of things for granted. In the Turbo pascal days. If you wanted to display a photo it would take hundreds or thousands of lines of code, especially if you wanted it to work for more that just your machine. Today it's step 1: copy file from camera, step 2 <img src="path/to/file.jpg" />
I'm not going back.