Pascal is under-appreciated. TurboPascal was my first programming language/platform on PC (used 286 in 1994) and the only problem I had was lack of documentation on actual video and sound hardware, not with the language itself.
I was surprised to learn that many DOS-era games I loved were written in pascal actually, some of them were pretty performant (Tyrian, for example).
Almost on the topic: in Russia there were popular school computers UKNC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKNC, pdp-11 clones with deep changes, with an RT-11 compatible OS. They were everywhere, well into late 199x, when they were deeply obsolete, because schools didn't have funding to upgrade classrooms. It was my first computing platform when I was a kid, but the only language accessible was BASIC, with a line editor (pretty strange concept nowadays), line numbers, no named subroutines, etc.
In 1997 I was suprised to find in a new school I've transfered to the same old computer but with Pascal compiler on it. With an actual editor, a very fast compilation time, and all still crammed into 64kb of memory. I was really impressed.
Almost on the topic: in Russia there were popular school computers UKNC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKNC, pdp-11 clones with deep changes, with an RT-11 compatible OS. They were everywhere, well into late 199x, when they were deeply obsolete, because schools didn't have funding to upgrade classrooms. It was my first computing platform when I was a kid, but the only language accessible was BASIC, with a line editor (pretty strange concept nowadays), line numbers, no named subroutines, etc. In 1997 I was suprised to find in a new school I've transfered to the same old computer but with Pascal compiler on it. With an actual editor, a very fast compilation time, and all still crammed into 64kb of memory. I was really impressed.