I started with Turbo Pascal 2 and took a Saturday morning class at McGill to learn it.
I began applying it to real time flight data recording on a first issue Compaq 386. Installed the working code on a souped up (for the day) industrialized 80286 PC under DOS with a LIM memory extension of 1 MB (or 4MB, I don't recall). This PC was flight ready out of the box (and $25,000 Cad bucks ....). It was cool to modify code while in flight test as minor bugs were discovered. (Do a test run, save the recording to HD, modify the code, compile run and do another test run...
It was neat to have an IDE - such as it was. Not many of those in use in our company at the time, and none at all in our division. One guy was starting test equipment in a thing called Windows. The few Mac aficionados snickered a lot. (Mac's were all but banned in the company at that time). At one point my code was so large that I could not run from IDE, had to exit to run from command line...
A programmer from another lab came over. She was coding Pascal for some DOS application. She thought it was evil to have an IDE that compiled and, gasp! ran the code. She saw that there were non standard reserved words. She declared it evil and not usable and left in a huff.
Meanwhile I completed the project swiftly (and maintained and extended it over the years following) while she stuck to MS Pascal and made slow progress... in all things...
I believe Pascal really should be a "bigger" thing these days. The politics of the time and the upstart C really derailed it as well as its presence in Windows development ... at least Pascal was a large influence on critical s/w development in its influence on Ada...