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Phillipe Kahn did have a large part of the world speaking Pascal -- at $49.95 a pop -- until Gates outdid him at his own game, with QuickBasic, which, for the same price point, gave the same structured features of Pascal, with the convenience of Basic. Pascal is painfully wordy!) The main thing going against QB (and its offspring right down to VB) is the name. I've tried reasoning with some folks until I was blue in the face, to no avail -- they refused to believe that modern "Basic" dialects were not global-mishmash, line-numbered, unstructured monstrosities.

However, the marketplace ate it up. QB was a lot "RADder" than TP, and it didn't take long for QB to eat TP's lunch. Borland fought back by coughing up "Turbo Basic" -- intended to be a QB-killer. Ah, but Gates out-Borlanded Borland! Shortly thereafter, MS delivered "Quick Pascal 1.0" -- a TP "near-clone", with almost identical syntax, more features, and a much nicer, easier to use UI.

Kahn got the message. Borland dropped TB, and MS dropped QP. QP 1.0 was the beginning and end of that dialect (and "Microsoft Pascal", a "full-price" compiler, faded into history too).

CP/M didn't come along for some time after MS's BASIC hit the streets, and, there were a variety of non-MS BASICs that were written for it. They all eventually failed, because they were by comparison crude, and lacked the support that MS could afford to deliver. I began with the TRS-80 dialect -- first tape, then the disc version; I remember how excited I was when they released the upgrade that recognized full variable names! Prior to that, only the first two letters of a variable name were recognized. "Total" and "Top" were both "To" as far as the interpreter was concerned -- and, they were both syntax errors too! ("To" was a reserved word.)

If there was any "language for the common man" that would have stood a chance for doing for "personal computing" what MS's BASIC did, it was Vulcan, AKA DbaseII. It would not have taken much to turn it into a general purpose programming language. If not for BASIC's ubiquity, I suspect Ratliff may have gone that route. In fact, after he sold off dBase, he started selling a new Vulcan -- a new, hopped-up version. I bought a copy, and upgraded it once, and while it's been so long that I don't remember much at all, I do seem to recall it having been beefed up into a fairly decent "close to general purpose" language.

Ah, memories...

(BTW if it seems that I am partial to Basic -- at least the modern dialects -- it's because I am. I not only cut my teeth on it, but, ended up seguing from my original career to become a software developer, and then, a "famous author" writing book and magazine articles on the language. MS Basic has been good to me.)