beastie boot menu, 4th (forth)

[Robert Watson]

On Sat, 10 Jan 2004, Michael Doyle wrote:

> On 10 Jan 2004, at 19:32, Mathew Kanner wrote:
> >
> > 	This book has had the most profound effect on me of any
> > programming document I've ever read (well, other than the turbo pascal
> > 4 manuals).
> 
> I don't know if it's showing my age or what, but I also have VERY fond
> memories of the Turbo Pascal 4 manuals. It was also the first
> IDE/compiler suite I ever owned, back when a PC running DOS 3.x was
> state of the art (and my school friends had BBC Micros or similar) 

I also have very fond memories of Turbo Pascal 4 -- it was the last
version of the TP IDE that I used that liked running on my 8088, and was
blindingly fast.  In retrospect, doesn't it seem amazing that you could
not only fit the full programming language, ide, linker, and tools on the
360k floppy disk, but also several programs and compiled output?  And my
recollection is that all the applications I used had much better error
handling for "out of disk space", since it came up so much.  Modern
applications seem to assume infinite space on the disk, and have a nasty
tendancy to lose data when meeting with an unexpected error on an
operation after open().  I've noticed this in xchat, the KDE sticky notes,
and many others.

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert at fledge.watson.org      Senior Research Scientist, McAfee Research