Anders Hejlsberg

8-bit microprocessors, right?

Yes, exactly.

And there was usually these kits that you bought that you had to solder together yourself.

And then, of course, they didn't work.

And then you have to figure out why they didn't work.

So you learned a lot about the hardware too.

And I bought a British Z80-based kit computer called a NASCOM and started learning assembly programming on that one.

And then I also met with some college buddies and we ended up founding a company and we had the first computer store in Copenhagen where you could walk in and buy a computer, one of these kid computers.

And later we sold Apple IIs and VIC-20s and Commodore 64s and blah, blah, blah, you know, all of those different ones, right?

TRS-80s.

So I did a lot of programming on those and found that programming was really the thing that I enjoyed.

And of course, they all came with Microsoft's ROM basics.

Um,

And which was slow, but it allowed you to write programs.

Um, but I always like missed having a real programming language, uh, something like Algol or that I had been taught.

Right.

And then by my buddy, the guy that I founded the company with, he was like, well, there's this new thing called Pascal.

You ought to check it out.

And it's, it's even supposed to be simpler than Algol, which was, which was actually true of every language we have created.

They got increasingly simpler as time went on and Pascal was not that hard to implement.