Fredrik Fatemi and Lawrence Kesteloot spent the summer of 1989 writing graphics programs in Turbo Pascal on a 286 PC (with EGA!) in a basement while watching The Princess Bride again and again on a VCR.

Fredrik recently found some 3½” diskettes with the programs on it. Lawrence couldn’t find a good way to run them on my Mac, so naturally Lawrence wrote a Turbo Pascal compiler which runs in a browser.

A few notes:

1. It implements the subset of the language and standard library that I needed to run these five programs. That’s most of the language and a useful subset of the graphics module.
2. It’s about 6,000 lines of JavaScript code and uses a hand-coded recursive-descent parser.
3. It compiles to p-code that’s binary compatible with the 1978 UCSD Pascal Compiler. (The real Turbo Pascal compiled directly to machine language.)
4. For kicks I also implemented a web version of the Turbo Pascal 3.0 menu. Only the Dir, Edit, Work File, and Run commands work. The language and libraries are closer to the later versions, though.

Check out the online version yourself here and read more from the authors and on Hackaday.