I don't know about Turbo Pascal 5.5, but Turbo Pascal (and Borland Pascal) 7 were great products. Grab something like the SWAGs (Pascal algorithms and code snippets) and Ralf Brown's Interrupt List and you'll be able to do pretty much anything that a machine of that vintage was designed for.
That, and Borland documentation is pretty well known for being a cut above the competition.