In fact the first programming I did on the Macintosh was using Borland's Turbo Pascal for the Mac.
I took an introductory programming class at the University of Kansas. it taught us Pascal and it was a new language for me (having really only known BASIC, noodled with assembly). It was a bit surprising that the class used Macintosh's — these running a kind of "project-less" version of Turbo Pascal as I recall where you simply fed in your source file with ReadLn() and WriteLn() functions sprinkled throughout and observed the result in some kind of console window.
I'm not sure if I was aware of THINK Pascal (or THINK C) at that time but when I soon after bought my first Macintosh (a Mac Plus) I went looking for software to program it and it happens that a professor was selling his copy of Turbo Pascal for the Macintosh.
So perhaps it was serendipitous, but Turbo Pascal became my introduction to Mac programming. I stuck with it for perhaps a year or two before moving over to the richer THINK Pascal. (And later I migrated to THINK C to run with the big dogs — having to learn about pointers and C parameter passing was a right pain in the ass for this naive young coder).
(By chance, I happened to be on a mini-quest recently to try to recover these old programs that I started and abandoned back in the 1980's. And I have come across my original Turbo Pascal floppies as well as some of the crude apps I tried creating with the tool.)
As others have said, I suspect Borland jumped into the game early gambling that the Mac might be the Next Big Thing, bailed early too when it turned out that it was not (that of course would quickly be the IBM PC clone market).
Pascal was a first class citizen. Indeed, quite alot of the original Mac was Pascal and 68k assembler. For example, strings were prefixed with a length byte as is popular in the Pascal world.
Apple even shipped a Pascal compiler with their MPW Shell - a development environment.
I took an introductory programming class at the University of Kansas. it taught us Pascal and it was a new language for me (having really only known BASIC, noodled with assembly). It was a bit surprising that the class used Macintosh's — these running a kind of "project-less" version of Turbo Pascal as I recall where you simply fed in your source file with ReadLn() and WriteLn() functions sprinkled throughout and observed the result in some kind of console window.
I'm not sure if I was aware of THINK Pascal (or THINK C) at that time but when I soon after bought my first Macintosh (a Mac Plus) I went looking for software to program it and it happens that a professor was selling his copy of Turbo Pascal for the Macintosh.
So perhaps it was serendipitous, but Turbo Pascal became my introduction to Mac programming. I stuck with it for perhaps a year or two before moving over to the richer THINK Pascal. (And later I migrated to THINK C to run with the big dogs — having to learn about pointers and C parameter passing was a right pain in the ass for this naive young coder).
(By chance, I happened to be on a mini-quest recently to try to recover these old programs that I started and abandoned back in the 1980's. And I have come across my original Turbo Pascal floppies as well as some of the crude apps I tried creating with the tool.)
As others have said, I suspect Borland jumped into the game early gambling that the Mac might be the Next Big Thing, bailed early too when it turned out that it was not (that of course would quickly be the IBM PC clone market).