Early Years

• Turbo Pascal was first released in the 4th quarter of 1983 and was considered very affordable compared to other Pascal compilers. It's affordability, speed and extensive software documentation quickly made it the program of choice when programming in Pascal, and competing products were scarce. These factors allowed Turbo Pascal to quickly became the programming language of choice for teaching in high schools and colleges.
  
  

Features

• Turbo Pascal compiled code into .com executable files which ran fast and were very small in file size -- a major benefit at the time. It's Integrated Development Environment brought a new streamlined approach to programming and no longer did users have to run separate programs for compiling and debugging. The executable programs created were "standalone" files, meaning they required no separate files or libraries to run correctly. This allowed great portability for programmers as only one executable file needed to be sent to another user or customer.
  
  

Evolution

• Later versions of Turbo Pascal improved the user interface by including a full-screen editor with pull-down menus. The .com executable was phased out and the compiler was configured to generate .exe executables. Various toolboxes were introduced to support graphical programming, color, sound, and overlays. In 1991 the first version of Turbo Pascal designed for use with the Windows Operating System was released. The final release of Turbo Pascal was Version 7, which was released in 1992.
  
  

Today

• Borland released Delphi 1.0 in 1994 as the successor to Turbo Pascal and it was orientated more towards Windows-based integration. Although Delphi was last released in 2005, the Pascal language itself was phased out in the 1990s in favor of faster programming languages like C/C++ and Visual Basic.