Upto Speed with Pascal

I dint use much of Fortran during the 80s even though I had become reasonably conversant with it. In the Bachelors program, the Casio fx-82 calculators were much more popular than anything computers or Fortran could throw at us. So that was that.


It served our purpose well and it was to become our workhorse. Nothing anyone said could convince me to write pages and pages of code on code sheets and then sit an input that into that green black hole!

Of course DOS 2.x and 3.x became a lot more friendly and by the time DOS 5.x came around with its shell, things were moving along quite rapidly in the computer world.

But then, computers were not very popular in military units and other than some rudimentary word processing, I was not even sure what they were utilized for. Databases like DBase, FoxPro were popular by then and there were even a couple of spreadsheet programs. VisiCalc was the first, but then anyone who could work those numbers on Lotus 123 were the gods!

So it was not until our Masters program that we were really formally introduced to computers. By then Pascal held sway in Engineering courses, and it was a whole generation ahead of Fortran of the early 80s. It is also when I fell in love with programming. Especially when iterative calculations were needed for design engineering problems. IDEs were rudimentary and we were still dependent on printed SDK manuals. All of us geeks had massive libraries of books and printed manuals!



Windows had arrived and could be started with the "win" command on the dos prompt, but who cared, as long as we could get our work done in DOS. Besides, all our IDEs were still DOS programs so, there was very little need to "bring up" Windows! Windows 3.1 and the arrival of the Internet of course, changed all that! Soon you no longer needed to bring up Windows, in fact, you needed to bring up DOS in a window, when needed.

The world had turned upside down!


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