The article covers some good points, but misses a few extra things that the Turbo Pascal 7.0 IDE included that made it a true powerhouse:
- A full OOP tree to determine parents/traits of descendant objects
- The ability to edit, assemble, and trace through both inline and external assembler code
- A registers window that showed all registers and flags at any stage of runtime
...all while able to run on the first 4.77 MHz 8088 IBM PC, which was long in the tooth by the time TP 7.0 came out. (The OOP tree required a 286 as they only added it to the protected mode IDE.) This made the TP 7.0 IDE a complete development and debugging environment for assembler as well as Pascal.
I still use it on that hardware for hobby projects, and while I have to wait 60-120 seconds for a compile, it's still more convenient for me than cross-compiling on Windows and then copying the code over.
It's not how well the bear dances, but that the bear dances at all. That said, EMS and a solid-state hard drived do help a little.
TBH for an original IBM PC i'd use at most TP5.5 as it is faster and you do not lose much in terms of functionality (IIRC the biggest loss is the inline assembler).
- A full OOP tree to determine parents/traits of descendant objects
- The ability to edit, assemble, and trace through both inline and external assembler code
- A registers window that showed all registers and flags at any stage of runtime
...all while able to run on the first 4.77 MHz 8088 IBM PC, which was long in the tooth by the time TP 7.0 came out. (The OOP tree required a 286 as they only added it to the protected mode IDE.) This made the TP 7.0 IDE a complete development and debugging environment for assembler as well as Pascal.