Is object pascal a dead language?

It was technically sound but the greedy fucks at Borland mismanaged it into the ground. It's one of the great failure stories of the 90s computer industry, up there with Commodore

Corel was another impressive fuckup.

tell me you still have the original IDE and compiler
I've had no luck reversing 16 bit code abandon ware from the era

Not that user, but I used to crack stuff in the 16 bit DOS days. It should be very easy with modern tools. The hardest thing back then was writing TSRs that had to patch several overlay loads with anti-TSR code to get to the right code (many programs loaded one 64KiB page at a time almost like a multi-stage bootloader today).

Enlighten me?

I'm confused as to what you're looking for. Where did custom compilers and unrecognized CPU architectures come from? Turbo Pascal on DOS was about as basic as it gets without literally being basic.

Maybe this helps you understand,
$ echo -en "\xcd\x21" > foo.com && objdump -D -b binary -m i8086 foo.comfoo.com: file format binaryDisassembly of section .data:00000000 : 0: cd 21 int $0x21

Is pascal still a horrible language? Way back in the 90s I learned how to program on Macs. Half of their APIs used pascal strings and the other half used C strings, and you constantly had to convert them back and forth. Also callbacks in the Carbon API, callbacks everywhere. I'm pretty sure most of the APIs werent even asynchronous, they just wanted to you to use callbacks because fuck you.

If you dont know what a pascal string is/was, the first byte would be the length of the string followed by the data.

What'd they do if the string was longer than 255 bytes?

Use more strings.