I learned on Turbo Pascal many years ago. It was amazing. There's another aspect beyond the TUI though: compiler speed. Turbo Pascal was designed for compilation speed. It was significantly faster than, say, Turbo C++ for an equivalent program.

But this brings up something I think about every now and again: resource bloat.

When Turbo Pascal was currently it'd be common for PCs to have 1MB of RAM. In fact with the DOS memory model you had to do weird stuff to use more memory than that (IIRC it was called "large mode").

Obviously running in a graphical environment is going to use more memory but we had pretty capable Windows environments with Win 95/98/SE/NT3.5/NT4/XP with not much RAM (256MB to 1GB depending on year).

Now with modern windowing systems we have capabilities that didn't exist in early windowing OSs like scalable rather than bitmapped fonts, UI scaling, etc. But we've had those things for 20+ years now and the resource requirements still keep going up.

Yes we have Javascript UIs running in a browser now and that will never be as cheap as native apps but we've also had those for ~20 years now (GMail is ~20 years old).

In the 90s we had graphical X Windows systems on Linux with 4-16MB of RAM. I know. I ran them.

Why do resource requirements keep going up? Is there demand for a low resource OS that could be user-facing? I know hardware is particularly cheap with Raspberry Pis and similar. We have ARM CPUs for a few dollars now that would've cost millions in the 1990s. So maybe that's why there's no demand.

But this is really something I expected to top out at some point and it just hasn't.