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> Easy answer, UNIX mass adoption.

On Unix mass adoption...

My best friend (and still best friend to this day) in the early 90s had an SGI Indy at home (his stepfather happened to be the director of SGI Benelux) and so I got to play with one of the earliest SGI Indy. What a machine to have, for teenagers into computing, at home in the early nineties!

The shock, the world of difference between a beige box running MS-DOS / Windows 3.1 and stuff like (Turbo) Pascal compared to that amazing SGI workstation...

I saw the future, I saw "my" future when I got to play on that SGI Indy. And then when I discovered Linux (back when it was shipping on a CD attacked to a book/magazine) I got to transform my MS/Windows beige PC into a (modest) Un*x station and never looked back (I'm using Linux daily since that day).

I don't have bad memories of programming in Pascal but both Pascal and Delphi felt, to me, like deeply attached to the MS ecosystem and a bit toy'ish (making it easy to do easy things, but very hard to make anything a bit advanced).

As soon as I found a way out of the MS world I was out and so I was done with Pascal/Delphi.



My first UNIX was Xenix, on a PC carried into the class once a week, that was then shared in turns between students.

Hardly impressive, with its green phosphor terminal.

SGI was interesting, then again I guess you didn't had much contact with Atari and Amiga scene back then, right?

Object Pascal dialect was originally created by Apple in collaboration with Niklaus Wirth (see clascal), used to write the Lisa and Mac OS operating systems (naturally they also had their share of Assembly, like UNIX also does).

They only switched to C and C++ after market pressure to have some compatibility with them.


Well, Turbo Pascal was simply not available on Linux, at least not "freely". I loved Turbo, and I missed it and I begrudgingly switched to C++. And as a side note, I hated g++ cygnus to the bones, because they had some fixes for c++ templates that were not yet released in the foss version, only in the "pro" release.

Oh how I missed Turbo for Linux...


Yes, that one of the triggers for me to eventually go into C++ as my next "to go language", I saw C the same way that Bjarne felt about BCPL when forced to leave Simula behind.

Interesting paying for cygnus stuff on Windows never occurred to me, I rather spent my money with Borland and Microsoft compilers.


SGI's were amazing! In one of my first jobs out of college (mid 90's) I had an SGI Indy on my desk. The company was a DEC shop and nobody wanted to deal with it. I used it mostly as an X terminal. A couple years back, I bought an O2 off of Ebay.




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