Simon Willison used Claude AI to decompile and analyze the 39KB Turbo Pascal 3.02A executable from 1985, creating an interactive artifact that breaks down the binary into labeled segments with decompiled assembly and annotated reconstructed code. The project demonstrates how modern AI tools can help explore and understand historical software artifacts. This serves as both a technical exercise in reverse engineering and a nostalgic look at early programming tools.
Background
Turbo Pascal was a highly influential integrated development environment and compiler for the Pascal programming language, released by Borland in the 1980s. Its compact size (under 40KB) while containing a full IDE and compiler made it remarkable for its time.
- Source
- Simon Willison
- Published
- Mar 21, 2026 at 07:59 AM
- Score
- 5.0 / 10