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orthogonal_cube • today at 5:03 PM • 3 replies • view on HN

Man, I haven’t seen Turbo Pascal since high school. We were lucky enough to have a CompSci class taught by our Stats teacher.

He offered three courses. CompSci 1 used Turbo Pascal and Delphi. CompSci 2 used C++ and Java. CompSci 3 used Microsoft Turbo Assembly and a language of the student’s choice.

We had to write our code and save them to floppy discs for submission since the lab systems had DeepFreeze installed on Win95, so any local storage wouldn’t persist.

Replies

ivanmontillam • today at 5:20 PM

> We had to write our code and save them to floppy discs for submission since the lab systems had DeepFreeze installed on Win95

Didn't realize DeepFreeze is that old. My lab used Angel Custodius[0], which was a hardware-based solution. It used a PCI-slot and the buffer was an IC on the PCI board.

It worked the same, rebooting the computer would restore the frozen state, because changes were never committed to disk.

It also was OS-agnostic, because it ran before booting anything. If you had a Linux server and got hacked, you just restarted it, though it remained vulnerable until you disabled the protection and actually patched it.

If you wanted to introduce changes you had to press a combination of keys to bypass it, by introducing the password. Mainly to apply pending Windows Updates.

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[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20040210055959/http://www.custod...

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spankibalt • today at 6:23 PM

> He offered three courses.

We had two courses at my school in early post-Wende East Germany ('91 onwards, on Amstrad PC2386 386/20 MHz machines): a beginner's computer course with OS intro (MS-DOS 4.01 and Windows 3.0), office applications, and typing... and a programming course via the GW-BASIC (later QBasic) to Turbo Pascal (much later Delphi) pipeline.

grep_it • today at 5:41 PM

Similar experience here, except it was Qbasic followed by Delphi. Good memories of passing our dumb little games around the compute lab. It wasn't till later in life that I connected Pascal to Wirth when reading Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs (I still think the last chapter on compilers holds amazing as an introduction to the subject).