Turbo Pascal was my first contact with compiled languages in school, after starting off with Commodore Basic as a kid and graduating to Amos and some other Amiga stuff later. TP was my first contact with real PCs, too. After school I moved to Delphi, which was basically a thin wrapper around the Win32 API with Object Pascal syntax and the nicest IDE I had ever used (and probably will ever use).
Delphi really paid my bills as a newbie commercial programmer. That was around the time when the internet took off, and I wrote my first CGI servers in Pascal to make dynamic websites. The Pascal/Delphi language and environment were incredibly versatile and you could write some really fast code with it.
Fond memories. In many ways, TP leveled me up as a programmer.
I think a lot of people would have claimed that the Amiga was the more powerful Personal Computer. In many ways, it was more interesting than the Mac or Windows computers. It simply didn't have the software support from Microsoft, for example.
In most alternate universes, the Amiga would never could have been a competitor to the PC or even the Mac.
The secret to the PC's success was not just the clone market, but the open architecture that permitted endless permutations on interexchangable components: motherboards, graphics cards, hard drives, etc. were all pluggable.
Amiga's custom chipset and architecture gave it a huge edge (mostly in multimedia), but the tight coupling made it an evolutionary dead end. Even if they licensed the OS and opened the architecture to clones, the hardware dependency wouldn't have been able to follow suit.
Absolutely, it took a long time until the games I made on my Amiga could be replicated on the PC. But by the time I was moving away from Amiga, it was clear that its time had passed.
Delphi really paid my bills as a newbie commercial programmer. That was around the time when the internet took off, and I wrote my first CGI servers in Pascal to make dynamic websites. The Pascal/Delphi language and environment were incredibly versatile and you could write some really fast code with it.
Fond memories. In many ways, TP leveled me up as a programmer.