I think your two issues are programming mindset (code today is structured and designed differently from code in the 80's - a lot of innovation is not in programming languages but in how programming is approached.)
Work from your Pascal experience:
- Learn Delphi, this will get you into Object Oriented languages while building off your Pascal experience - this gives you a strength to fall back on.
- Using Delphi, write various GUI applications, this will move you from a procedural style of programming to todays event-driven style of programming.
- Having mastered Delphi, move to C++; the two are similar enough to allow you to translate the concepts from Delphi into roughly equivalent C++.
- Write GUI applications in C++ to see how modern platform APIs work (Qt, win32, wxWindows, dare I suggest MFC?)
- You can doodle with C++ more advanced features (templates etc.) or decide not to bother, however following C++ you can move to "higher" languages like Java and C# if desired, or move toward dynamic languages like Python and Javascript.
- Write a server-app in a few of those; don't bother with scaling any of it, but make sure the code elegantly handles any and all error conditions.
Then you should be in the modern world.