[PaulHoule]

ISO Pascal from the 1980s was popular as a teaching language but it was missing many features needed for systems programming. In my high school they used Pascal for introductory programming classes on a Digital VAX-11/730. The limitations would leave many people taking a class like that who were aware of other programming languages thinking it was a toy language.

Apple came out with Object Pascal in the early 1980s which was the official programming language for the Lisa and original Mac. Borland came out with Turbo Pascal that went through numerous iterations and by the end of the 1980s I thought it was much better than C for the IBM PC but I switched to C in college because it was portable and would run on 32-bit Sun workstations.

By grad school I had jumped into Linux with both feet and had given up on DOS and Windows, around that point Borland came out with Delphi which was basically "Object Pascal for Windows" and was a direct competitor for Microsoft's Visual Basic intended for developing GUI applications quickly.

Today there are still people who remember Delphi fondly and there are quite a few Delphi clones out there.

[mustntmumble]

I'm somewhat bemused that your school ran the toy ISO Pascal on a VAX, because VMS came with its own version of Pascal! VAX/VMS Pascal had some cool language extensions that made it extremely suited and extremely popular for VAX/VMS Systems Programming! VAX Pascal supported native VMS strings intrinsically whereas in VAX C you had to use cumbersome string descriptors to pass strings from C to the VAX/VMS RTL or Starlet (System Libraries). Ah happy memories, I miss VAX/VMS...

[PaulHoule]

It might have been the full DEC pascal but we were taught to write standard Pascal.

[kagakuninja]

I was in college in the early 80s at UCSC, the VAXen were running BSD UNIX. Many of the professors hated C, and made us use UCSD Pascal, which had uh, limitations... Like fixed size arrays and oh, the free function didn't actually free anything.

[einpoklum]

> Borland came out with Turbo Pascal that went through numerous iterations and by the end of the 1980s I thought it was much better than C for the IBM PC

I was first taught proper programming on Turbo Pascal in 1992 as a summer class (for nerdy kids obviously) I took when I was 11. It was taught by some undergrad student from what would eventually be my alma mater. I have very vague, but very fond, memories of that experience :-)