살아가는 이야기
Turbo Pascal의 추억 본문
1980년대 말 Turbo Pascal이라는 놀라운 프로그램이 있었다. DOS 시절 바로 실행 파일을 생성해 주는, 엄청나게 빠른 컴파일러였다. 관련된 글이 있어 여기에 스크랩해 둔다. TR-TD
== QorA에서 퍼온 글 ==
In 1983, Microsoft's $500 compiler required a stack of floppy disks and minutes of waiting. Then a $49.95 alternative shrank the entire process into 35 kilobytes and compiled in seconds.
Mainstream compilers from Microsoft and IBM relied on a tedious multi-pass process. A programmer had to load a text editor from one disk, write the code, save it, load the compiler from a second disk, generate an object file, and finally load a linker to create the executable. Because early PCs often had only 64KB or 128KB of RAM, these components could not sit in memory simultaneously. Development was defined by constant disk-swapping and slow floppy drive speeds.
Turbo Pascal bypassed this bottleneck completely. Developed by Danish programmer Anders Hejlsberg and marketed by Philippe Kahn’s newly formed company, Borland, the software introduced the Integrated Development Environment (IDE). It combined a text editor, compiler, and linker into a single, unified program.
More importantly, Turbo Pascal was small enough to load entirely into RAM alongside the user's source code. Instead of writing intermediate object files to a slow floppy disk, it compiled code directly in memory in a single pass. A program that took three minutes to compile in Microsoft C took just seconds in Turbo Pascal. Programmers could write, compile, run, and debug their code without ever leaving the application.
Borland sidestepped traditional enterprise software channels and sold Turbo Pascal via mail-order advertisements in magazines like Byte. The $49.95 price point made it accessible to students, hobbyists, and independent developers who had been priced out of the market by Microsoft and IBM.
The sheer speed and affordability of Turbo Pascal turned it into the de facto standard for learning programming and building PC utilities throughout the 1980s. Its success eventually forced Microsoft to abandon its high-priced, multi-pass dominance and scramble to release competing integrated products like QuickC and QuickPascal.
