I had an inkling entering 500 lines of BASIC on a ZX-86 only to get error after error that programming wasn't for me. Trying for a clean compile in TPascal convinced me that abandoning it was not only desired, it was righteous.
I've always been a C guy, but I did dabble with Turbo Pascal. Back in the days before gcc, C compilers were only available on Unix machines (well, there was a MS C compiler for the PC, but it was shit back then), so Turbo Pascal was a freakin' godsend for low-budget PC developers. That initial compiler was amazballs - a full-featured (mostly) Pascal compiler, linker, and editor - and they didn't even fill up one 360K floppy for all that magic. All that changed pretty fast, but Borland deserved 100% of their early success.
What, like TPascal wasn't a problem? Granted - the BASIC was contemporary. Prolly '81, '82. TPascal was in Windows 95 if I'm not mistaken. Any school that actually wanted you to learn programming had long since switched to Cplusplus... much like my program did, right after I transferred out of it. ...into another program that required us to run composite matrix transforms on the DEC Alpha in the basement, which involved compiling mutherfucking fortran in 1998. That peaced me out of programming pretty effectively.
By the time Windows came around, Turbo Pascal was already well ruined by bloat, unfortunately.
I was using it back when DOS 3.1 was king. Yeah I'm old as dirt.