No kidding; I remember the first time I found a C compiler for under $100; I felt like I hit the jackpot.

One of my first C compilers was only free without floating point support.

I guess it was crippleware...

And now javascript is free without int support!

cripplefreeware

Turbo Pascal first or early version was for $50 I think. And many other compilers were ~$500 around the same period.

Price point was important, you could get Cobol and Fortran for $30.

https://books.google.com/books?id=_i8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA38&lpg=P...

Turbo Pascal really set the standard for IDEs that would run on consumer machines (as opposed to workstations). The compilation times were near zero, even on my 12.5MHz AT. Switching to Turbo C++ was a huge step backwards in that regard (AMD 40MHz 386DX, hit compile, go play Frisbee for 15 minutes).

Yes, Turbo Pascal was blindingly fast - I could type almost as fast as I could think :) (I mean, even though incrementally compiling my code every few lines) - equivalent or better than a scripting language - at least for small to medium-sized programs. Fantastic for exploratory programming and learning and correcting as you go, though also for bigger, less exploratory stuff. I don't think I've met its match to this day. I read that the Borland developers who created it wrote it in tuned assembly language.

Turbo Pascal was the best, for that time. Unfortunately it didn't really set the standard, as no IDE I've used afterwards has ever been of comparable speed, without any lag anywhere ;)

Exactly what I said in my sibling comment :)