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by odersky 1961 days ago
I was the co-author of Turbo Modula-2 for CP/M. It was quite a capable system to fit in less than 64K. Great memories.

At the time Borland intended to develop their own version of Modula-2 for IBM PC, so they bought ours as a complement for the CP/M versions they were still covering. But the in-house version got delayed a lot. It was eventually released as Topspeed Modula-2 several years later, from a spinoff. If Borland had let us also do the IBM-PC version in around 1984, maybe history would have changed and Modula-2 would have become more popular.

2 comments

Kudos. I loved M2. I haven't replicated the sublime satisfaction I enjoyed from writing M2 since, in any other language. I felt like I could produce most any business solution with it, one module at a time.
University of North Dakota used Modula-2 as its language for CompSci starting in Summer 88 (not sure when they switched away from it). I get the feeling some of the decision was because they had a version running on the IBM 370 under CMS. XEDIT was an interesting editor.

I liked it but remember the I/O commands were frustrating as heck. It would be interesting to C-syntax it and see what the reaction is.