I understand there were a number of problems that went the other way.  Motorola dropped the ball, software
was buggy, and IBM needed an immediate answer.

On the other hand, there was
no excuse for a Pascal compiler to be either large, buggy, or slow, even before Turbo Pascal.


On 30Jun 2016, at 10:05 AM, Marc Rochkind <rochkind@basepath.com> wrote:

Not for those of us trying to write serious software. The IBM PC came out in August, 1981, and I left Bell Labs to write software for it full time about 5 months later. At the time, it seemed to me to represent the future, and that turned out to be a correct guess.