> The ad broke in November, and that month we took in 1100 orders. So the ad was paid for. The second month we took in 2500 orders.
It's a bit tricky to figure out the exact breakdown since it requires knowing when people got a copy of that issue of Byte, how long it took for their mail order to get to Borland, and how many copies were sold per order. Turbo Pascal wasn't even released until November 20.
Still, my eyeballing says 150K in the first month is pretty much spot-on.
The ad, by the way, cost $9,000, to be read by 400,000 people world-wide. Each physical unit cost about $4 to produce. And all the orders were filled by hand for the first couple months.
FWIW, they also did word-of-mouth (like at COMDEX) and used dealers.
I tried but failed to find the ad. Archive.org is having problems, with very slow response times, failing searches, and failing downloads. I think the Byte issue is at https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1983-10/ . Wow! It's 675 pages long, and a topic for that issue is "Unix on Micros", with 9 articles about different aspects of Unix.
(I assume it needed all those articles to balance out the humongous number of ads, so they could get a lower postage rate.)
Here's Borland's ad a year later for TP 2.0 - https://archive.org/details/Computer_Language_Issue_01_1984-... and here's Dr. Dobbs' review of 1.01 in their June 1984 publication - https://archive.org/details/1984-06-dr-dobbs-journal/page/74... . Oh, and an article about it in Germany in September 1984 at https://archive.org/details/peeker-1984-01/page/50/mode/2up?... .
Don't know if the last bit is true, but they did make 150K in sales in the first month ... from a single ad and in 1980s dollars, which is quite remarkable.