This hits home. Turbo Pascal was the thing (although I've barely noticed at the time) where I learned actual programming, as we know now.

I had played a lot with the Spectrum (a Sinclair zx spectrum 128k) and its BASIC interpreter but that was mostly copying from magazines and changing some parameters. And BASIC is weird :)

A few years later in school in the 90s, Pascal was "the" language that most people learned the basics in, at least in my country.

Unknowingly I sort of absorbed all that and it only started making sense when a few years later I decided to get into actual programming with perl and eggdrop bots and plugins or whatever they were called.

Damn, the 90s, IRC and Quake were awesome!