Borland released Turbo Pascal in 1983 for $49.95 — a price that undercut the competition by a factor of ten and included an editor, a compiler, and a linker in a single executable that fit in 64 kilobytes and compiled code fast enough to feel instant on the hardware of the day. It was written almost entirely by a Danish programmer named Anders Hejlsberg, who was 22. Turbo Pascal introduced a generation of programmers to fast compile cycles and integrated development, and Hejlsberg went on to design Delphi, J++, C#, and TypeScript — a career trajectory that represents an arguably implausible concentration of influential language design in a single person. Borland eventually lost its way, was acquired, and dissolved. Hejlsberg remains at Microsoft, still writing language specifications. The $49.95 compiler is now a museum piece.
