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My first encounter with TP was as a high school senior in 89/90 in an AP programming course. What a blast. Anyway, for those who miss it, the binaries for Bor

My first encounter with TP was as a high school senior in 89/90 in an AP programming course. What a blast. Anyway, for those who miss it, the binaries for Borland TP/TC were released some time ago. Probably linked off the Wikipedia page. The entire Borland Turbo series was cool. I had Turbo C, Pascal, and BASIC. Though Quick BASIC was the gold standard (and almost as fun), my heart will always have a soft spot for the original Borland DOS text-based IDEs. In terms of utility value per byte of executable, that was such an interesting time. There were so many cool boot sector viruses and utils during that era. Anyone else remember that full-featured DOS-based .COM text editor that fit in a single floppy disk sector (512B)? The original text-based DESQView? So many, many neat programs given the limited hardware.

ja27 15y ago
I'm trying to remember what all I used to run from a single 360k DOS floppy on a 640k 8088. I had at least DESQView, QEdit (which might be the editor you're thinking of), and a VT100 emulator.
Luyt 15y ago
I really liked Turbo C... It was so nicely integrated: the editor, compiler, linker, visual debugger and excellent help system. It also had a nice paned IDE which actually looked good and made it very usable on those old DOS systems. [I had been using Alcyon C on the Atari ST and Lattice C on PC before I discovered Turbo C]. I always have been (and still am) a fan of the Borland series of developer tools - still using C++Builder today and still liking it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Kahn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Kahn "Philippe Kahn is a technology innovator and entrepreneur, who is credited with creating the first camera phone solution sharing pictures instantly on public networks. [...] Kahn has founded four successful technology companies: His current company, Fullpower Technologies, of which he is CEO, Starfish Software, LightSurf Technologies, Borland. Fullpower provides solutions converging life sciences, wireless technology, sensing such as accelerometrics, nanotechnology and MotionX solutions. MotionX is the core technology that powers the Jawbone UP Band and the Nike+ GPS solutions."
davedx 15y ago
Yep, I learned C in Turbo C! It was so confusing, going from a BASIC interpreter to a compiled source language in an IDE. The good ol' days.
ajuc 15y ago
I've learned English trying to understand documentation for Turbo Pascal 7 :) That, and playing games. The first game I've made was written in Turbo Pascal in 13h. It was 2d arcade shooter, witch "asteroids" physics, tiled terrain, and diablo-like system of better weapons and enhancements to buy to your ship. And it was under 600 kb (including graphic), because I didn't knew how to use extended memory from Pascal. It was procedural code with few global variables that contained whole state of game. Code was just many procedures calling each other, and I divided it all into 2 files, because TP had limit on code size to 65536 bytes or sth like that. So I just cut and pasted a few procedures to the second file. It was horrible code, but it worked, and was quite easy to modify despite the lack of architecture, because it was small. And because adding hacks when you have global variables is easy. And most importantly - the game was quite fun to play. Unfortunately I've lost it in hard disk accident a few years ago. Anyway - constraints are good for you, because you have some hard decisions made for you. And caring over implementation details more than about the result is bad. Now I program with all the cool technologies, use oo principles, design patterns etc, but it's less fun, and the result is most often unfinished project. I just can't keep motivation all the way from buidling foundations to making it a finished game. Maybe that's because now I have job and less time (and energy) for hobby, or the fact that I'm doing more ambitious projects now. But I think it's also because now I overengineer. Maybe it's time to try small and ugly coding once again?
89988989 15y ago
They are still using Borland Turbo series is still used in many colleges to teach C,C++,Pascal and maybe prologe

ja27 15y ago

I'm trying to remember what all I used to run from a single 360k DOS floppy on a 640k 8088. I had at least DESQView, QEdit (which might be the editor you're thinking of), and a VT100 emulator.

Luyt 15y ago

I really liked Turbo C... It was so nicely integrated: the editor, compiler, linker, visual debugger and excellent help system. It also had a nice paned IDE which actually looked good and made it very usable on those old DOS systems. [I had been using Alcyon C on the Atari ST and Lattice C on PC before I discovered Turbo C]. I always have been (and still am) a fan of the Borland series of developer tools - still using C++Builder today and still liking it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Kahn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Kahn "Philippe Kahn is a technology innovator and entrepreneur, who is credited with creating the first camera phone solution sharing pictures instantly on public networks. [...] Kahn has founded four successful technology companies: His current company, Fullpower Technologies, of which he is CEO, Starfish Software, LightSurf Technologies, Borland. Fullpower provides solutions converging life sciences, wireless technology, sensing such as accelerometrics, nanotechnology and MotionX solutions. MotionX is the core technology that powers the Jawbone UP Band and the Nike+ GPS solutions."

davedx 15y ago

Yep, I learned C in Turbo C! It was so confusing, going from a BASIC interpreter to a compiled source language in an IDE. The good ol' days.

ajuc 15y ago

I've learned English trying to understand documentation for Turbo Pascal 7 :) That, and playing games. The first game I've made was written in Turbo Pascal in 13h. It was 2d arcade shooter, witch "asteroids" physics, tiled terrain, and diablo-like system of better weapons and enhancements to buy to your ship. And it was under 600 kb (including graphic), because I didn't knew how to use extended memory from Pascal. It was procedural code with few global variables that contained whole state of game. Code was just many procedures calling each other, and I divided it all into 2 files, because TP had limit on code size to 65536 bytes or sth like that. So I just cut and pasted a few procedures to the second file. It was horrible code, but it worked, and was quite easy to modify despite the lack of architecture, because it was small. And because adding hacks when you have global variables is easy. And most importantly - the game was quite fun to play. Unfortunately I've lost it in hard disk accident a few years ago. Anyway - constraints are good for you, because you have some hard decisions made for you. And caring over implementation details more than about the result is bad. Now I program with all the cool technologies, use oo principles, design patterns etc, but it's less fun, and the result is most often unfinished project. I just can't keep motivation all the way from buidling foundations to making it a finished game. Maybe that's because now I have job and less time (and energy) for hobby, or the fact that I'm doing more ambitious projects now. But I think it's also because now I overengineer. Maybe it's time to try small and ugly coding once again?

89988989 15y ago

They are still using Borland Turbo series is still used in many colleges to teach C,C++,Pascal and maybe prologe