The language
behind GAMES

Pascal · Turbo Pascal · Borland · the university years

Pascal, born to teach

Pascal was designed around 1970 by Niklaus Wirth at the ETH in Zürich, and named after the French mathematician Blaise Pascal. Wirth's goal was not raw power but clarity: a small, elegant language that would teach structured programming — programs built from clean blocks, loops and procedures instead of tangles of jumps. A program had a visible shape: begin at the top, end. at the bottom, and honest logic in between.

Turbo Pascal: the Borland revolution

In November 1983 a small company called Borland, led by the French-born Philippe Kahn, released Turbo Pascal, built on a blazing-fast compiler written by the Danish programmer Anders Hejlsberg. It was a European idea that conquered the world: for about $49.95 — when rival compilers cost hundreds — you got the compiler and an integrated editor in one program. You wrote, pressed a key, and your code compiled in seconds, all inside what we would today call an IDE. For a generation of students it felt like magic.

Version after version — up to the beloved Turbo Pascal 7 with its blue text-mode screen — Borland's compiler became the natural habitat of anyone learning to program on a PC.

Into the classrooms of Europe

Because Pascal was invented to teach, and Turbo Pascal made it cheap and instant, the two swept through European schools and universities during the '80s and '90s. Computer science courses from Scandinavia to Italy adopted it as the first language: strict enough to build good habits, friendly enough not to scare anyone away. Lab rooms hummed with the same ritual — write, compile, run, and make the PC speaker beep with SOUND(n).

From Pisa to your browser

That is exactly where GAMES comes from: a university lab at Pisa, two students, one Turbo Pascal compiler, and six little games stuck forever at version 0.99. This site rebuilds them with today's web technology — but the soul, the green phosphor and the square-wave beeps are pure Turbo Pascal.

Read how GAMES was born, or go straight to the arcade: