Teletypes were 110 baud and the old army RTTY my brother interfaced to my 128-byte MEK6800D2 computer (similar to the 6502-based KIM) was about 45 baud, IIRC.
And I actually had a colleague at work scoff at me for getting the 1200 baud modem for my C-64 since 300 baud was plenty fast enough for typing.
I don't mean to sound like I'm picking on you, fm6. You sound younger than me, so I wanted to clarify some history and give some thoughts on the points you raised. (Credit is due you for knowing this history; most of the programmers I work with, even some of the older ones, wouldn't know what you're talking about!)
[TP] was designed to run in a single 64K 8086 segment - which was a lot of memory in the 70's and 60's. Pascal was also designed for one-pass compilation, which helped. Of course, there were also C (Mix and Turbo) compilers and a very fast Ada compiler (Meridian?) that ran on PC XTs. Anyone remember the 1K and 2K Tiny Basics of DDJ fame?
Pascal is the quintessential block-structured language. The real problem is that the designers of FORTRAN were totally ignorant of the principles of language design. - Algol was, I believe, the original block-structured language and largely a contemporary of FORTRAN (see the Algol 1960 Report).
Every programmer who's grown up with block structured languages would take it as a given that Dijkstra was right. - yes, the jump-on-the-bandwagon-I-want-to-use-XML-too-type programmers. A subsequent issue of ACM's Computing Surveys was devoted to the GOTO controversy and included a long article by Knuth that took issue with Dijkstra's edict. (I think it was in this article that Knuth said that good programmers, by nature, always write structured code, no matter what the language.) In real-world code, where, for example, error checking and handling is required (and using languages without exceptions), mindless structured-programming adherents often went to great lengths to avoid using GOTOs, producing unintentionally obsfuscated code in the process. Every technique, even GOTO, has its place for reducing the complexity of code.
... Crowther and Wood were still using computed gotos in 1976! - My memory is hazy, but wasn't it FORTRAN 77 that added block-structured control flow, etc. to FORTRAN? Also, when you think about it, computed GOTOs were FORTRAN's equivalent of C's switch(){} statement. Yes, you would get the occasional hacker mashing up computed GOTOs into spaghetti using techniques such as Duff's Device, but most of us could restrain ourselves!
You learn something new everyday! I'm currently reading Gerald M. Weinberg's Exploring Requirements and, just this morning, while reading the chapter on measuring user satisfaction, I came across his example of the FORTRAN FREQUENCY statement as something the users didn't like. I had never heard of the FREQUENCY statement, but it was required after 3-branch IF statements in early FORTRAN programs to hint to the compiler what branch(es?) were most likely to be taken. According to Weinberg (or his co-author Donald C. Gause), the increased compilation times incurred by performing IF-statement optimization were annoying to users who, like most of us, had to compile their program many times during debugging and then would run the final working program just once.
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Teletypes were 110 baud and the old army RTTY my brother interfaced to my 128-byte MEK6800D2 computer (similar to the 6502-based KIM) was about 45 baud, IIRC. And I actually had a colleague at work scoff at me for getting the 1200 baud modem for my C-64 since 300 baud was plenty fast enough for typing.
I don't mean to sound like I'm picking on you, fm6. You sound younger than me, so I wanted to clarify some history and give some thoughts on the points you raised. (Credit is due you for knowing this history; most of the programmers I work with, even some of the older ones, wouldn't know what you're talking about!)
You learn something new everyday! I'm currently reading Gerald M. Weinberg's Exploring Requirements and, just this morning, while reading the chapter on measuring user satisfaction, I came across his example of the FORTRAN FREQUENCY statement as something the users didn't like. I had never heard of the FREQUENCY statement, but it was required after 3-branch IF statements in early FORTRAN programs to hint to the compiler what branch(es?) were most likely to be taken. According to Weinberg (or his co-author Donald C. Gause), the increased compilation times incurred by performing IF-statement optimization were annoying to users who, like most of us, had to compile their program many times during debugging and then would run the final working program just once.