That it was finalized around the same time Turbo Pascal 1.0, which only ran on DOS and CP/M, was released.

> The starndard was late. By that time, it wasn't needed because the only Pascal that was widely used was Borland's.

The ISO standard closely followed the 1974 language description, which served largely the same purpose and had generally the same shortcomings on utility, so that the “interoperable but not useful because following a very limited common description, or useful but not interoperable because of proprietary extensions on top of the common description” predates the ISO standard; the lack of a common labguage spec was never as much of a problem as the focus of the spec.

And, no, by December 1983, Turbo Pascal (released the month before) was not the only Pascal that mattered. Nor would it be later in the 1980s, as Apple's Object Pascal (which influenced later versions of Turbo Pascal) became important.