The History of Pascal and Games

[WILL]

Here is a little timeline I devised just for fun. :)

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Genesis Period (1970 - 1990)

1970: Niklaus Wirth creates Pascal.
1983: Borland creates Turbo Pascal.
1985: Larry Tesler and Niklaus Wirth create the first version of Object Pascal
1986: Borland introduces Object Pascal extensions for Turbo Pascal for the Macintosh.
1989: Borland introduces Object Pascal extensions for Turbo Pascal 5.5 for DOS.

Golden Era / Late Pre-Windows Period (1990 - 1995)

1994: Apple drops Object Pascal.
1994: Borland creates Delphi and enhances the Object Pascal language.
1995: Borland drops Turbo Pascal development.

Dark Ages (1995 - 2000)

1997: Florian Paul Kl?§mpfl creates the Free Pascal Compiler.
1997: Project JEDI started!

Early Renaissance (2000 - 2002)

2000: Hori creates DelphiX, the first Pascal game library for Windows.
2000: savage and technomage open the DelphiGamer website.
2001: Borland releases Kylix for Linux.

Late Renaissance (2002 - 2004)

2002: BlueCat opens DGDev forums site.
2002: savage releases JEDI-SDL.
2003: Borland releases Delphi 8, the first Pascal compiler to support .NET.

The New Era (2004 - 2006)

2005: WILL and savage opens PGD website! First year of the PGD Annual competitions!
2005: Free Pascal Compiler 2.0 is released, making cross-platform support a major feature of the tool!
2005: Borland releases Delphi 2005, with major changes to the IDE.
2005: RemObjects creates Chrome for .NET.
2005: Development on Virtual Pascal stops.
2006: Legolas ports FPC to GameBoy Advance, the first console to be supported by Pascal!
2006: Turbo website closes.
2006: Borland moves all developer tools to a new sub company CodeGear.
2006: Legolas ports FPC to Nintendo DS!
2006: Borland releases Turbo Delphi, the first freeware versions of the IDE/compiler tools.
2007: savage releases the first translated XNA SDK demos for Chrome.
2007: Borland releases Delphi 2007 for Win32, the first pascal compiler to specifically target Windows Vista.
2007: Paul Nicholls releases 3rd party port of FPC for GP2X.
2007: Drewski starts first 3rd party work on a port of FPC for XBox.

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I'm probably missing a ton of stuff, but it took a while to gather all of this so I'm going to leave it for now and probably modify this list later.

Enjoy! :D

[JernejL]

2003: Borland releases Delphi 8, the first Pascal compiler to support .NET.


i thought they released one as plugin for D7..

[paul_nicholls]

Hi Will :-)
you misspelled my name:


2007: Paul Nicols releases 3rd party port of FPC for GP2X.

:D

PS interesting info about the history of Pascal :)

cheers,
Paul Nicholls.

[WILL]

2003: Borland releases Delphi 8, the first Pascal compiler to support .NET.


i thought they released one as plugin for D7..

Not that I was aware of... :scratch:


Ooops, sorry Paul! I made the fix. ;)

[jdarling]

Well, WILL you have a few things wrong but your pretty close :).

Delphi 7 was the first Pascal IDE to support .NET compilation, though it was through a bastardized interface that didn't actually compile down to ICL. But, you could develop .NET applications within it.

Chrome was the first Pascal compiler for .NET with TRUE support of the .NET framework and environment. In fact, CodeGear's implementation of Pascal on .NET still isn't considered as full support due to some memory management under the hood.

Delphi was in development by 1993 and was in beta in 1994. It was released late 1994.

Even though you mention that Apple dropped Pascal as the official development language you don't mention when Apple started using it as the official language.

Since your mentioning everyone else, you really should mention Indy. Its been a very strong influencer in Delphi for a long time now.

Since I'm mentioning things that should be listed: Where are Delphi mag, Delphi Developer, and the likes? I'd mention Torry.ru since it was/is a mainstay site.

You forgo SWAG (SourceWare Archive Groups), best I can find on it anymore is: http://www.bsdg.org/SWAG/index.html and http://www.filegate.net/pascal-net/passwag/index.html

I'll have to see if I can lookup some dates for the above. But, I think they would be key players :)

[Almindor]

Free Pascal was started in 1993, and had features Delphi only dreamed of yet in those years (eg: function overloading etc).

I guess there are some other pascal compilers worth mentioning too (Vector Pascal? I don't know them tho)

[dmantione]

I would put the Golden age between 1977 and 1997 or so... 1977 because the release of the release UCSD Pascal which rapidly spread Pascal accross various platforms, including the historically very important Apple platforms. Later Turbo Pascal took over and made Pascal a dominant language.

1997 is a good end because that is when Borland became Inprise, which was a strong departure from the mainstream market. However, Pascal as mainstream language was already in decline by that time, so you can end the Golden Age a few years earlier, perhaps 1994 or so. Pascal lost a lot of market share during the last years of Dos dominance, because of the popularity of 32-bit Dos Extenders for which there was no Pascal solution.

[dmantione]

The "Late Renaissance" is also a very badly named. These are the years Delphi lost big in its home market "client-server". Hobby Delphi coding decreased to a minimum. Borland's .NET adventure killed everything. I would call this the "Black Age".

If there is a Renaissance, we are in the middle of it. Codegear appears to be back on track, Free Pascal is getting stronger, the community is growing...