When I started grad school, in 1986, I'd written a lot of Pascal and used Turbo Pascal on my PC. But the school used Sun workstations with unix, so I had to learn C pretty quickly. Nobody seemed to use Pascal. There was a Modula II compiler around, but it was a resource hog and never popular.
Oberon was published about the same time. I thought it was pretty cool and worked on a compiler for it, though the language evolved out from under me.
My impression is that none of the Wirth languages made much of an impression in any of the US grad schools in that era. Of course, I didn't see everything that was going on, but I saw most of the compiler work. Almost 100% in C, moving eventually to C++.
Thinking about it a bit more, I realize I've over simplified. Things were more diverse. At the time, there were significant academic compiler projects in the US written in PL/1, SETL, and Lisp. ML (as in Standard ML of New Jersey) work was getting started. I knew older guys who were interested in Algol 68. In academia, I saw no PCs and most grad students didn't have one.
