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Borland Releases Old Turbo C, Turbo Pascal for Free 155

Posted by CmdrTaco from the thats-kinda-nifty dept.
Geek Boy writes "Borland has released for free on their website, Turbo Pascal v1.0, v3.02 and v5.5, and Turbo C v1.0, v1.5, and v2.01. They also have links to the story of Frank Borland and the "TurboMan" ad from September 1988. " No source code (that would be pretty smooth) but I'm tempted to put Turbo Pascal on my box and see if I can't compile some of my old hacks with dosemu. I wrote a 15,000 line BBS game my soph year of high school... I wonder if I still have a copy.
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Borland Releases Old Turbo C, Turbo Pascal for Free More

Borland Releases Old Turbo C, Turbo Pascal for Free

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  • I've got the 2.0 disks and manuals. If you want them, Ricochet, let me know!
  • Well, Micro$oft isn't giving away Windows 3.1, but someone else is:

    http://members.primary.net/~cholo wat/utility.html [primary.net]

    You can even get Windows 1.x! You can't say Microsoft hasn't made some progress.

  • better than MS VC++??
    turbo c++ looks kinda old. does it have support for templates, namespaces, exceptions, RTTI, the STL? It's not a rhetorical question, i seriously don't know. i've never used any borland products before. It may be small & sweet which is great for hello worldesque projects but i'm not sure if it's worlds ahead of MS VC++.

    Don't get me wrong, vc++ has got a lot of known issues (bugs) and probably the worst STL implementation that i have ever seen but for windows development, it's pretty handy.

    Then again i consider myself a novice programmer (just learning semaphores and condition variables) and since my programming experience is limited to just 2 compilers (ms vc++, gcc), maybe i'm just totally clueless and turbo c++ is the best thing since sliced cheese.

    jacob

  • I still have my manual for that beast (which I bought for CP/M way back in '84.)
    Now I have to see if they have the Turbo Toolbox and Turbo Tutor companion programs.
    Remember, Frank Borland is sorta like J.R. "Bob" Dobbs.
    --
  • However, unless the folks that Borland sold Turbo Prolog to (PDC - Prolog Development Corp) open up and let Prolog for DOS go free (they've got "Visual Prolog" now, for Win9x, NT, and supposedly Linux), we probably won't see a free usable version of Prolog. Especially for DOS.

    Win32 Visual Prolog was on a PC Plus cover disk a few months back - fully functional, with the usual restrictions about being for non-commercial use etc., IIRC. Tried it a bit, but didn't like the mandatory type system (you have to predeclare everything with the argument types).

  • Amazing how ^K^B, ^K^K, ^K^V, ^K^C all came back even though I haven't used an editor with those key combos in years.

    I used an editor supporting those commands... yesterday! Borland still uses them, so JBuilder 3 - and probably C++Builder 4, Delphi 5 - can be set up to use the ole' WordStar standard.

    RimArts, a Japanese shareware company, also use the WordStar commands for their Dana editor/word processor for Windows, including the editor in their excellent Becky! email client.

  • The way they cheated byte was rather incredible. The sales people of byte visited Kahn in his office, where he put out posters naming all big magazines with numbers behind it, and only byte stroken througth. And then he told them, he could advertise in all magazines but didnt have enough money left for advertising in byte. That way he got the ad on credit... :-)
  • Ah Jeasus. This brings me back. Not that I remember much about college. I do remember writing my first few lines of REAL (non BASIC) code on TP. (not in the Beavis sense). And then on to Turbo C, followed by Windows coding on BC++ 3.1. I even used BC3.1 last year on a clients product. Ahhh they don't build compilers like they used to!

    And yes, Brief. Brief features on my top 5 programs of all time. The Keyboard macros were FANTASTIC! Saved my arse and my deadlines more than once.

    Of course, Its all Microsoft now. Shoddy, shoddy workmanship...

  • I wrote my first Pascal programs with Turbo Pascal (I think it was 3.0) on CPM as well.

    The hardware ? Commodore 720 in CPM emulation mode. That must have been around '84 back in high school.

    /ol
  • I never looked for "console mode" in it (I don't even have it installed currently), but Delphi 4 includes a full copy of Delphi 1, which is the original Win16 version, on the CD. Does anyone know if that supports DOS?

  • It's cool and all, but too bad they're not releasing the newer stuff. (no, I'm gracious for what they have released, and I know why they can't.)

    I actually own, and can locate the disks for, newer versions. (of course, all the older versions I owned, I had pirated ... got them all as a kid, and the first piece of software I purchased was TC++ 3.0 and then TP 7.0 ... wish I had more money to afford the Borland versions back then.)

    Now I'm a microsoft programmer 99% of the time, but I *soooooo* wish I could use Delphi as easily as VB. Just doesn't pay to learn a new language for me, though. (not one that I don't get paid.) Feel like such a traitor.

  • Yay, and that's just about that...

    ...VERY cool thing. VERY VERY cool thing. =) Too bad they didn't released TP 7.0, but I'm not complaining 'cuz I have the original floppies and manuals.

    Ah, nostalgy... I learned OOP when I was using TP 7.0, and TP 3.x was the first DOS compiler I have used.

  • SCO was always a separate company, however, they never really owned Xenix, they licenced it. So, Microsoft probably owns the code.

  • TP3.0 (Score:1)

    by AT ( 21754 )
    I downloaded Turbo Pascal 3.0 for old time sake -- it was the first programming language I used.

    Amazing how ^K^B, ^K^K, ^K^V, ^K^C all came back even though I haven't used an editor with those key combos in years. Couldn't for the life of me remember how to exit the editor and compile though, so I had to kill it :)
  • http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~boul tonj/snipes.html [caltech.edu]

    Not yet, but maybe you can add it for him :).

  • As far as I can tell, their website contains only zip files containg the original contents of the disks.

    It would be nice to have an official, blessed by Borland's (Inprise's?) lawyers, statement telling us what we can and can't do with these images.

    I assume that we can freely download the zipfiles from Borland's site, and install Turbo Pascal on machines with said zipfiles. But can we, say, put those zipfiles up on the web ourself? What about installing Turbo Pascal on a thousand machines from a single download? (The licenses of some downloadable software prohibit this) What about reverse engineering; is that allowed?

    Or, since the old "you agree by breaking this seal" license agreement isn't reproduced in the .zip files, are we perhaps bound by no agreement at all? (This might in fact be legally the worst of all possible situations, since then even downloading it is murky territory)
  • I actually had one of those nifty Sidekick manuals with the Borland guy on it...

    And used Turbo Pascal 3 in my CS class in high school. Of course our teacher, I remember, was a little bit of an old-timer and got amazed every time we added a little bit of color to our program (e.g. "ooh, color! that's wonderful!")
  • IIRC Borland never correctly implemented ISO-standard-Pascal device I/O, but other than that it was a fine product. IMHO nested procedures in Pascal encouraged a better programming style than plain-C did.

    Cheers for Borland!
  • What I would really like Borland to free is the source code for Sprint, a MS-Word competitor ten years ago.

    It had nice features for something to run on a 8088 with 512KB RAM (spell checking, autosave, customizable UI), and its formatter was inspired from Scribe.

    It seems that the company that made it (it was not originally written by Borland) it making Midi hw and software right now.
  • Let me stick mine up here!

    Exact same configuration. I was taking a university course to complete a degree, and had the option of using any programming language / system. I had this Osborne and had seen ads for this $49.95 compiler. Bought it and fell in love with Borland and their products.

    Now we just need the original Sidekick!!!

  • The memories! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I remember being 15 years old, walking into a software store for the first time and picking up the only (repackaged, btw) copy of Turbo C 1.5 they had in stock for $150. I remember the sales man telling me "good luck" on the implication that I, like many before me, wouldn't be able to make use of it. Boy was he wrong! I'll never regret that purchase. Using ALT-F1 in Turbo C basically taught me C. Thanks Borland. Sorry about that whole Microsoft thing.
  • COLECO, hehe haha, i saw an episode of the simpsons where they were making fun of coleco... (the one where Lisa cheats on a test)

  • Well, GEM runs from Windows. And I would assume that if you renamed a few files (win.com) it should work.

    As to the legality of this... Microsoft deserves it, we should also reverse engineer these copies since the EULA won't really apply.... Just to see the resulting pissed off look on Pearly (Gates)'s face.... hehe
  • ... Is that there are now free useable *16bit* compilers out on the net. I hope the FreeDOS guys take notice...

    ---
    Joseph Foley
    InCert Software Corp.
  • I was an out of work archealogist/musician in 1988, trying to get a real job at the tiny upstart PC's Limited (soon to be renamed Dell Computers :-) I had no computer experience except for some basic electronics hobby activity and my Sinclair ZX-80 (not the Timex-Sinclair, I'm talking 4K ROM, 1K RAM mail order from England white shell model.) My band mate loaned me a 8088 PC and I sold enough plasma to buy TurboC.

    I taught myself enough C with the TurboC manual to get hired into Dell tech support. Within 6 months I'd written a bunch of useful C programs and got myself promoted into the engineering dept..

    11 years later I'm the Director of Technology for CyberPlex USA, an internet technology company. I've been a development manager at Dell, Tivoli and Motive. I've taken companies public and ridden some of the hottest stocks in the industry. I've learned 2 languages or environments a year every year, gotten married, bought an old church to rennovate and had a kid.

    Thanks Borland. Best money I ever spent.

  • Re:The best thing about this... (Score:3)

    by Jim Hall ( 2985 ) on Thursday July 29, 1999 @06:51AM (#1776856) Homepage
    I hope the FreeDOS guys take notice

    We certainly have! When I was made aware of this yesterday 7/28, I immediately contacted Borland to determine if (a) their free compilers can be included in our distribution, and (b) if Borland will consider releasing the source as well along with the binaries.

    This is a Good Thing(tm) for FreeDOS, and pretty much anyone who uses DOS.

    -jh

  • Amen.

    Somebody forward this to the folks at borland, the higher-ups I mean...

    And if anybody else remembers DesqView/X; let's get together and dig it from the ruins of Quaterdeck, shall we?
  • I wonder if they're still making money off these two? These were the ones I was using way back when, and stuck with them until I started C/C++ with DJGPP.

    Hopefully they'll release these two in a few years. I'd love to be able to go back and compile a few of my programs and demos.
  • Sprint was great! Lately I have been thinking about going back to it. As a DOS program, it could be used under the DOS emulator in Linux, as well as under Windows.

    Now that most laser printers contain at least a few fonts, the payback for editing font tables for Sprint would be immediate.

    The one shortcoming, I think, would be the lack of tools for inserting images.

  • Well done? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I wish other companies were going to do the same
    with their old software that has no commercial value anymore (Hello, Amiga? Do you hear me? Kickstart 1.3, at least...) This sort of software can still be quite
    useful (I occasionally need to compile some old ms-dos only source code to run under dosemu) and it is quite nice to be able to
    reuse my old 286 for something (still running).
  • Anybody know were I can get a program that can unpack the arc files?

    unpack caused win98 to close the dos window!
  • (a) their free compilers can be included in our distribution, and (b) if Borland will consider releasing the source as well along with the binaries.

    Have they responeded (in particular about the source, but also about redistribution...)

    ---
    Joseph Foley
    InCert Software Corp.
  • I've got my brother's old TP 1.0 disks (originals) kicking round somewhere. I've never used it... started out with v6.0 personally. Only thing I ever really wrote was a Yahtzee game... Took the cheap way with some non-standard, warned against properties...
  • Who else out there had a copy of
    Turbo Pascal running on an Osborne
    back 1985?

    A dig at Ole' Bill.
    Back in 85 I was trying to use Microsoft
    Pascal on a TIPC (tibm). Took 15-20 mins. to
    compile.

    I got me a copy Turbo Pascal, my compile time
    dropped to 20 seconds. I fell in love.
  • If you're interested in (free) text formatting software for DOS, check out my old "FORMAL" program, which compiles under TurboPascal on DOS.

    Note, this isn't a wordprocessor, but a text formatter like "nroff", or more like IBM's old "script" (which it was cloned from).
  • I have to agree that this brings back an awful lot of memories.

    Those first late night hacking sessions, learning the intracacies of the PC and it's architecture. Learning what a "register" was and then writing code in C that should have been done in assembly.

    I have to admit that I still have my original disks and manuals for most of these compilers on my shelf at home. It's nice to see that they are being made freely available.

    I do have to say that I find it interesting that Borland left so many "gaps" in the releases they posted. They may as well have posted every release (TP4, TP5). I can't see as it would have really hurt anything.

    Ah well, at least these treasures from the past are available for reminiscing.
  • If you're interested in (free) text formatting software for DOS, check out my old "FORMAL" [ajwm.net] program, which compiles under TurboPascal on DOS.

    Note, this isn't a wordprocessor, but a text formatter like "nroff", or more like IBM's old "script" (which it was cloned from).

    (Sorry about the double post, I screwed up the HTML for the link in the previous and Slashdot ate it.)

  • Borland won't even bother to discuss y2k compliance of the latest version of TP. Forget anything older than that. (And 7.0 -- I used it for my freshman cs class last year -- won't run properly on some newer machines. Delphi lacks console-mode capability for the moment -- they tell us it'll come with the next release. It seems Borland is intent on killing pascal... at least they did *something* clueful.)

  • Oh yeah, TOP THIS! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Hah! I had the CP/M version of Turbo Pascal running on a...

    COLECO ADAM!!!!!

    Love those dual tape drives and dual 160K 5.25" floppies!

    I used it for my college AI class. Class project was to write an Othello/Reversi program. Mine kicked ass - I saw the Professor the next fall, he said that he couldn't beat the thing.
  • Thank you but that won't be necessary, I already have them. I also have the TC++ 3.0 disks too bad they only compile on a 386 or better. At least the binaries work on 8088 and better.
  • In the fall of '98 I had to use TP7 DOS or TP1.5
    WIN for my Intro to Programming class. Cost 50 USD:-) TP7 is very fast and elegant. I hope they release it soon.
  • Turbo Vision has been available for some time (there are even 2 or 3 ports to GNU/Linux/curses), but without a license statement (so I can't package one of them for Debian). Perhaps they can care to fix this now? I love TV (and I loved Turbo/Borland Pascal).
  • I think one of the coolest things I did in sophomore year was program a clunky D&D type game in Turbo Pascal. I miss on-the-fly programming for fun hehe. I don't think I ever finished the entire thing, but it sorta looked like 'Blademasters' from the old MajorBBS system, without multiplayer support.
    Howard Salis
  • I have a set of Wordstar disks for the ancient Northstar Advantage (Z80 based system) in my attic. No idea what version of WordStar, but the NorthStar definitely runs CP/M. I even have the CP/M manual that came with the machine!
  • Control-K Q I believe.

    Like CmdrTaco, I wrote a BBS in Turbo Pascal years ago. It was quite successful, too. My newer BBS projects were in C on a ghastly version of Unix. I spent some of the most fun years of my life running that thing.

    D

    ----
  • Err, delphi does suppport console mode (console mode, probably in a dos window only tho). In Project>Options>Linker there is an option to "generate console application". Don't know if it will run in pure dos though.
  • Brings back memories of my Pascal teacher who stressed good programming concepts. If she ever caught you using spaghetti code, you got an instant zero. I spent many an hour in that computer lab. No games were allowed but several of us skipped lunch and pep assemblies to go play "Scorched Earth".

    I think it was Pascal 4(?).
  • This sucks, I'm competely unable to find a Apple IIe/+/c/whatever emulator that actually works on my little Debian potato machine.

    There's one included in the distribution, but it
    dies due to a svgalib problem. I was after an X program if possible.

    All I want to do is play Lemonade Stand and loderunner, surely there's some hope for me, rather than dosemu?!? :)
  • I guess in particular, after reading the quickie link [slashdot.org] of the History of the GUI [pla-netx.com], I always wanted to play with a copy of Windows 1.0. Now, you can't buy it anywhere, it's certainly not supported, and nobody (now or even then) runs it, so why not make it a free download? Is there still a possibility that they're trying to make money off of it? >snicker<

    Seriously, Windows 1.0 is a perfect example of something which has no value these days, and obviously is not supported, so why not make it available.
    --

  • templates, RTTI, exceptions etc. have nothing to do with GUI programming. In fact, I was careful not to include any GUI stuff since i'm assuming turbo c is for dos.

    Some ppl (like myself) use that crap for building console apps, no gui. so, i'm beginning to think it's more of a trade-off than an issue of one being better than the other. msvc has more features (not including gui stuff) but slower compiles while turbo c is more simpistic and compiles faster. makes sense.

    jacob

  • This is a great gift to budding programmers. It was the environment that made Turbo C great for me to learn. It didn't have the nonsense that Visual C had, the help was much easier to find, and the compiles were instant. If you wanted to try out a few quick lines of code, it was hard to beat. Turbo C just didn't seem to have any bloat in its compiler.

    I did buy Visual C++ (upgraded from MSC 5 through 6) and my brain started to rot. Perhaps that was my fault, but I do remember getting along very well with Turbo C and wrote lots of school projects and getting many A's with it.

  • Yo! (Score:1)

    by sjvn ( 11568 )
    For me it was a KayPro II running CP/M. Course the first time I used Pascal was on an DEC PDP-11 running Unix sometime in the late 70s. That was a Bad idea.

    Steven, Senior Technology Editor, Sm@rt Reseller
  • A while back id released the source for Wolfenstein. Anybody have a pointer to it still? I think they used TC3.01 to compile it....
  • How legal is this?
  • I wish that there was decent, modern WordStar. As is, I still run WordStar 7.0 in DOS as my word processor of choice whenever I'm stuck on a Windows machine.

    As memory serves me, there was a WordStar command clone that worked on MS-DOS and Unix in under 64K named... vde?

    On Unix, I'm a vi fan, but it would be great to have a full-fledged WordStar clone for Linux.

    Steven, Senior Technology Editor, Sm@rt Reseller

  • I looked around a bit at lotus.com and couldn't find it. You wouldn't still have a link?
    --
  • This was a game I wrote in a couple of hours on the Atari Portfolio, using TC2.0... Ever hear of it? I put it online a few years back, it might still be kicking around.

    Man, that was a fun project - from concept to product in just under 3 hours, and a fully working game to boot!

    I think I've still got the source code for it around somewhere... should see if I can dig it out and fire it up on the old Portfolio, which has been collecting dust.

  • Snipes was passe...

    "hunt" is where it's at - it could even be played over MODEM!!!

  • The best thing about this.... is that we can all drown ourselves in nostalgia. I'm just waiting to take out all my old projects, old hecks and demos and see how they'll compile.
  • I'd have to say I'm confused as to why they released only Turbo C 1.0 and 2.0...what could possibly be wrong with releasing Turbo C/C++ v3.0 for free? I mean, it's a 16-bit DOS compiler from 1992, what do they have to lose by releasing it?
  • I wish Borland would release these two products for free also.

    I know they can't be making any money off either, so why shouldn't they, ya know? I'd LOVE to have Borland C++ for OS/2.

    And wouldn't it be really great if they released source code for all this stuff.

  • The interface for TP 4 was dreadful, IMHO, and they got rid of all the nice features, like generic data structures.

    I remember learning Pascal, using TP 3, and writing a meteorological database as an O-level project. Wrote a generic file I/O system, which allowed me to read/write data structures of any type to and from disk, in just a few lines of code. Nothing special, by any stretch of the imagination, but it felt good to write.

  • There's an SVGALIB-based Linux version being slowly cobbled together. Look around Freshmeat and you'll find it.
  • Turbo Basic came out after TP3 and Turbo Prolog. The copyright was sold back to the origional author and was released under the name Power Basic. Last I saw, it was at ver 3. Very nice compiler if you like basic.
  • It's hanging around at www.bricklin.com

    It's about 25k in size! Heh!
  • Me too. I wrote thousands of lines of TP code, starting with version 2.0 and riding the upgrade train to version 5.5.

    I wrote a BBS entirely in Turbo Pascal, plus a bunch of utilites and games for it. I'd guess it was about 30,000 lines of code.

    The programming habits that Pascal forced me to use have stayed with me now that I do C, and I'm a better programmer for it.

    The only downside was that since TP was so powerful, I kept putting off learning C, which stalled my career for a bit until I did.

    Joe D
  • I know this may offend some Emacs diehards, but but back in the days of using Turbo XXXX (fill in the blank), the number one editor was (and in modern form still is) Brief. When the hell is Borland going to make that freely available?? Has anyone recently purchased a copy of it from Borland?

    How about open sourcing that one so we can port it to Linux? That would be cool. For now though, I am quite happy with Visual SlickEdit for both Windows and Linux.

  • This is too cool... TP 5 is the first real compiler I used, about 10 years ago. Had to steal it at the end of my first class, just in case I would need it at home one day (I didn't have a computer to run it on, but hey). And the environment was awesome, much less confusing than TP 6 IMHO. Hell, I still use the same keyboard shortcuts in XEmacs!

    Tired of C-x-s? Would rather make use of those neat (and otherwise useless) function keys at the top of your keyboard? An elegant solution to a common problem, re-bind Emacs commands to their Turbo shortcuts. With judicious of Meta and Control, you can get a lot of power at your fingertips. Plus the nostalgia factor... ;)

    Add this to your .emacs:

    ; delete is real delete, not freaking backspace
    (setq delete-key-deletes-forward t)

    (global-set-key [f1] 'info) ; F1 is Help
    (global-set-key [(meta f1)] 'describe-function)
    (global-set-key [(control f1)] 'describe-key)

    (global-set-key [f2] 'save-buffer) ; F2 is Save
    (global-set-key [(meta f2)] 'write-file)

    (global-set-key [f3] 'find-file) ; F3 is Open
    (global-set-key [(meta f3)] 'split-window-vertically)
    (global-set-key [(control f3)] 'make-frame)

    (global-set-key [f4] 'kill-buffer) ; F4 is Close
    (global-set-key [(meta f4)] 'delete-window)
    (global-set-key [(control f4)] 'delete-frame)

    (global-set-key [f5] 'advertised-undo) ; F5 is Undo
    (global-set-key [f6] 'kill-region) ; F6 is Cut
    (global-set-key [f7] 'copy-region-as-kill) ; F7 is Copy
    (global-set-key [f8] 'yank) ; F6 is Paste

    ;(global-set-key [f9] 'compile)
    ;(global-set-key [f10] 'switch-to-buffer)
    ;(global-set-key [f11] 'enlarge-window)
    ;(global-set-key [f12] 'make-frame)

    ; auto-indent after return
    (global-set-key [(return)] 'newline-and-indent)

    Mmmmh, and that was all of 10 years ago... Maybe I should say that in my resume "Been programming for ten years".

    Anyways, I just downloaded the beast, and sure enough, it runs great on NT. The compile+run time is so fast, I did it three times before realizing I had to switch to user window to see the output!

    TP rocks...

  • The old Borland is back, I was wondering what was going to happen when they changed to Inprise...

    I don't know the legalities of this, but I just downloaded the zip files for TP 5.5 and TC 2.01. My advice for distribution (for personal use, of course...) is to unzip these without expanding the directories (just use pkunzip, if you have it), install it (since the filenames are unique, it won't look for the other disks... nice feature, that) and then archive the installation with a real archiver like RAR. I did this, and they both fit on a 1.44MB disk, with some room left over (enough for a copy of rar, say. :). Now I'm going to bring it home, and install it.

    Why, you say? Well, it's a perfectly good, free DOS development environment. If you ever wanted to back-port something to DOS, or compile something with Borland extensions, here's an easy answer. They both run flawlessly under DOSEmu, as far as I can tell, so my Linux-only environment is safe. And they're free. If anyone asks you, Borland gave it to you. :)

    Also, I have a lot of old Pascal code I've been porting for sentimental reasons. It'll be interesting to compare this. If I remember correctly, TP5.5 started supporting OOP in Pascal, which I loved. (TP7.0 did it right, but TP5.5 started it, I think) However, I just got a copy of the new version of Free Pascal, and it looks like it might do a good job under Linux... I'll have to compare it to my own porting efforts. (I've got my old graphics libraries working in C and SVGALIB now, I got plasma and color-cycling to work, so I'm happy... :)
  • I saved a boxed copy of Win1.0 from the trash recently.. it comes on a floppy disk, and Write comes on a 2nd disk. I haven't booted it in anything yet, because my computer is linux (no dos support at all) and my brother's computer doesn't have a 5 1/4" floppy. I can put it up somewhere for download, if someone wants to mirror it when MS comes knocking :)
  • Sidekick eh? Anyone out there ever use Dashboard?

    Looking back, I guess it was a kind of CDE rip-off, rather fitting that I'm using XFCE now... It sure beat the pants off of Program Manager.

    Corel actually bundled a copy of version 3.0 with WP6.1, but by that time it was useless..

  • Actually, it is at 3.5 right now - they also have some kind of Windows version that is a replacement (of some sort) for VB.

    I have only played around with 3.2 - for a DOS level BASIC it really kicks the crap out of QuickBASIC 4.5 (haven't ever played with Turbo Basic) - my favorite part is it's ability to inline assembler code (which you have to do if you want to use any VGA mode worth using!)...
  • Turbo Pascal ran on DOS only up to and including version 6.0 . I should know, as it is the last version of TP that I used - having started using TP3.0 on a PC when I was 12.

    It was a different product that supported Windows, called TP for Windows, and they reset the version number to 1.0.
  • Try CTRL K D .
  • As a side note on that, all the Borland manuals had a page in the front indicating that the manual was written using Scribe.

    I never saw Scribe, but if it was good enough to write a book with more than 2 fonts, then you could probably use it for almost anything.

  • Gee, um, I've still got TC 3.0 installed on my DOS development machine. Not *hardly* useless, not by a longshot.
    -russ
  • According to my understanding of software law [pobox.com], everyone has the legal right to keep and use code downloaded from Borland. Their copyright still holds, though, so you can't copy it. You're doing the right thing to ask for permission, but even if they don't give it, you can still point people to those URLs.
    -russ
  • Really. The Sam's teach yourself C in 21 days (chuckle) comes with 3.1 which is pretty worthless for anything beyond "hello world" so I can't imagine 2.x is all that useful (hell, it wants windows 3.1 to intstall, thats got to tell you right there).

    This would be kinda like Microsoft giving away Windows 3.1 (whoop1) :-P

  • Turbo C++ rocked the house (Score:3)

    by FigWig ( 10981 ) on Thursday July 29, 1999 @07:27AM (#1776934) Homepage
    Borland had some great development tools. Turbo Pascal was the fastest compiler I have ever seen. I still use Turbo C++ 2.0 for development when I need to quickly hack up some code. It's simple interface and lightning fast compile times make it worlds ahead of MS VC++. I only wish that I could resize the screen to arbitrary size (right now it is DOS text mode) and it could generate 32-bit code.

    It looks like there are a couple of projects to mimic this interface in a GCC environment. Here's one:
    http://www.rpi.edu/~payned/xwpe/
  • There are a lot of old notebooks to be had for a song (8088, 80286, 80386SX) that kick ass as dedicated controllers. TurboC is a huge boon for making them useful. Also the whole embedded PC world benefits with a solid free compiler.

    So for robotics, home control, art goo and a lot of other stuff, TurboC is VERY useful!!!
    (and actually pretty darn fun)
  • Heck I still use 1.5, I would have been using 2.0 but I can't find the disks anymore. It still works great on my old laptops and old desktop computer (not to mention controllers based on the intel x86 family).
  • Indeed, even today, standard C++ still does not have nested procedures. This is one of the features I miss the most from Pascal.
    The string support in the language was also much better.
  • > pep assemblies to go play "Scorched Earth".

    You too? Scorched Earth was great, especially for its time -- it even supported that newfangled (sp?) "SVGA" :).

    Is Scorched Earth still around, in any form? I don't even think a Windows version was made...

    Alex Bischoff
    ---

  • The best thing about this is, I can pull out my old Artillery Simulator I wrote in TP6 and play around with it some more!
  • "IMHO nested procedures in Pascal encouraged a better programming style than plain-C did"

    as long as you use the one-file-for-the-program approach Pascal forces from you (aside from units, accessed via far jumps) But still you get this long part inbetween procedure/parameter declaration and variable declaration, which makes it a little hard to read. Or could you use "forward;" with nested procedures?

    If you use multiple files, the C style, using "static" achieves about the same thing, except you dont have to care about the correct nesting of procedures if you later on decide to do other procedures, which need those tiny helpers as well.
  • BBS doors ?? It was quite painful to code ...
    Nah.. piece of cake.. at least for RemoteAcces, QuickBBS and SuperBBS. First wrote a toolbox (RAdoor) later also used RADU which basicly reimplemented the CRT unit fossil awear, and once you have this lowlevel stuff out of the way, creating doors (RANews f.e.) and utilities (UserOn) was a snap..

    Even wrote a multiuser adventure in tp5! MyMUD 2.something is still around on the net.

  • Didn't read enough of the page, I suppose.. It has this link on there, where you can download it.

    http://members.primary.net/~cholowa t/utility.html [primary.net]

    Not illegal, if you ever legally owned (and did not sell) a copy of Windows 1.0 ..

  • Ahh, Turbo Prolog. I worked for 5 years teaching high school kids how to use it at a BYU summer camp. We switched to Prolog from Pascal because half of everyone interested in CS already knew Pascal, and Prolog really teaches a different way of thinking that can somewhat transfer over to functional languages, too. Lots of fun, and the libraries it had (characteristic of the Borland Turbos) added made it actually useful. There's still some things I would rather code in Prolog than anything else. I haven't found a Prolog I like as much yet (or even, really, a useable one).

    However, unless the folks that Borland sold Turbo Prolog to (PDC - Prolog Development Corp) open up and let Prolog for DOS go free (they've got "Visual Prolog" now, for Win9x, NT, and supposedly Linux), we probably won't see a free usable version of Prolog. Especially for DOS.

    Anybody want to start a petition? Email me.

    (iowa_so8ng@hot8mail.com -- Remove eights).
  • A while back, I heard that Symantec had also
    released some of their old development stuff
    free as well (Think C 5? Think Pascal?). I
    poked around their website, but couldn't find
    much. Anybody know anything?

    Also, anybody wanna help me petition to get
    Turbo Prolog released? It was actually sold
    to a company called PDC a ways back; now that
    they're several years into "Visual Prolog" maybe
    they'd release the old DOS version?

    -Weston
    iowa_so8ng@hot8mail.com (Remove eights)
  • Hear, hear!

    All of this great software and a lot of other really cool stuff like Ventura Publisher, Xywrite, etc. were designed to run on an 8086 machine. Anything faster was frosting on the cake. Remember, or was it just me, but didn't there seem to be a time when software products were judged on their performance and functionality?

    (I still use my '286 and use Xywrite becuase it is still the best wordprocessor for writers, IMHO.)

    But i wonder what would happen if we abandoned the M$ gui's...Hmm

    well, we'd have smaller programs, running faster on our current machines than the apps we have now, it would be a more open market for developers of applications, we wouldn't be having to buy a new machine every six months so that the new upgrade we HAD to buy to fix a small bug, runs at about the same speed and performance that the previous version did. Maybe that 600k spreadsheet we created in 1985 wouldn't be 15MB now....

    Nah.... the powers that be would never let us do that!

    (sigh)


    Russ
  • TC2.0 won't fit 360k but you can use it on a computer with just one 360k disk drive by using few disks. IDE is smart enough to ask you to insert the disk with lib's to compile stuff. I used this approach back in 1991/92. Even today I use BorlandC++ 3.1 for DOS.

    AtW,
    http://www.investigatio.com [investigatio.com]
  • Dashboard was great. Made win 3.1 usable. It actually worked on win95 too after a little tweaking.
  • BorlandC++ 3.1 supports templates, STL,

    AtW,
    http://www.investigatio.com [investigatio.com]
  • BorlandC++ 3.1 supports templates, STL and exceptions. In either case you don't need them if you make a small project (10k lines) or even larger one. Compile times are fast and given the compatibility (with proper programming) with Unix, you can do a quick hacks on Win32 machines.

    AtW,
    http://www.investigatio.com [investigatio.com]
  • No. Turbo Pascal, at least, optimized fairly well. It also came with a "smart linker" that stripped out unused code. You could write a 2K "Hello World" program with TP. With TC,I think it was about 12K.

    With BP7, I wrote an object oriented math package that could symbolically take the derivative of functions, and graph them along with the derivative. EXE size: about 100K.

    (I've sinced open sourced it and am converting it to C++. Get it at http://cvs.seul.org/~yoderm )
  • The worst thing about this is that I allready
    bought all of those.

    I have all the version up to 3.1
    and then I bought OS/2 version
    then I switched to IBM after Borland dropped OS/2

    What I want is the Linux version. I don't give
    a rat's ass about the graphic version, I want
    a command line version with a working turbovision.

  • Lotus, now the owner of the original Visicalc, has released the first version of Visicalc for PC-DOS. You can get it from the Lotus web site. It weighs in at a grand 27K for a fully-functional spreadsheet. Hell, the PDF of the quick-reference card is bigger than that.


    ...phil
  • Freshman year of college, I got a job working at my local SoftwareETC (lured in by the "loan out software" policy). I ended up buying a copy of TurboProlog. A year or so later in Human-Computer Interaction class, when we were given an assignment to write a shell, and told it didn't matter what language, I wrote it in Prolog. I got a 98. The instructor had taken 2 points off because in my finite state diagram I had used rectangles instead of circles. I'm convinced that he just didn't know the language, and was looking for something to take points off on. :)

    I remember trying to teach fellow students how to work with TurboPascal vs DOS, and having to make statements such as "The menu in pascal knows what you want to do after the first letter you push, so you don't have to hit Enter. But with DOS, it doesn't know when you're done, so you have to hit Enter to tell it."

    Ahhh, memories.

  • I logged more hours in front of various versions
    of Turbo Pascal than a growing boy should have.
    I wrote terminal software, inventory programs; it
    made me the programmer I am today.

    Even though I never touch Pascal now, I suppose
    I will never lose my proficiency, ingrained as it is.

    It is a nice thought that perhaps a new generation will cut their teeth on this software like I did, but now there is Free Pascal. I'd personally just recommend Perl and C these days, anyway.

    If you want software straight from the source, Wirth's Oberon environment is a free download, and can run under DOS, Linux, or can boot standalone.
  • (1984-1987, during which time we moved from Apples and TRS-80s to a Novell network of PCs. But no internet or unix in sight)

    ...the kids who would write out text letters into pascal files, then tell each other their passwords so that they could pass notes. Hey, we didn't have an email system yet. Being system administrator, I would go in and correct their spelling.

    ...my friend who wrote a parser in TurboPascal to count the words in Green Eggs and Ham, because he'd heard that there were exactly 50. He ran it, there were 52, he was depressed and left. I looked at his code, found a bug, reran it - sure enough, 50. I never told him. :) (Numbers from memory! Don't anybody flame me and tell me they're wrong!)

    ...same kid who wrote a D&D character generator (didn't we all?) Of course, his worked by generating random numbers, and then applying a huge bunch of If statements to make sure that the abilities matched the class you wanted, and if they didn't, it would start over. So if you asked for a Monk you had to wait 10 minutes to get a good roll.

    ...our "friend" who wrote an accounting package in GW-Basic, then sold it for a few thousand...several times. I remember, even then, thinking "But you already wrote it, how come you're selling it to the next guy for the same price as the first guy?" That was about 16 years ago..last I heard from that guy he was trying to break a cocaine habit :). So the evidence is there: write commercial code --> get addicted to cocaine. :)

    ..the discovery of our first networked game, Snipes (Novell). Ah, the joy of seeing that familiar looking little beastie appear on screen. "The hell?!" you yell, as you hear "What's that?" from the other side of the room, and it dawns on you what multiplayer is all about. Your little guy is on his screen, his little guy is on your screen. Snipes becomes an instant classic and has to be removed from the network. Toward the end of the school year the teachers ask me to reinstall it because they have nothing for their kids to do.

    ..the test where the teacher said just to write any sort procedure. A friend wrote "random sort", which would grab two numbers and exchange them (without comparison) and then check to see if everything was in order. I wrote recursort, a recursive version of bubblesort. It got marked wrong, because the teacher couldn't find the failthrough/terminating condition. I said "Duh, when they're sorted, it falls through." He said "Oh."

    Ah, memories.

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