Revisiting Borland Turbo C/C++, A Great IDE back in the 90s – CodeProject | Hacker News Reader

Revisiting Borland Turbo C/C++, A Great IDE back in the 90s – CodeProject

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16 pointsmyth_drannon10 comments

It wasn't "one" IDE.

Turbo C existed as a product. Turbo C++ was another product. They weren't the best or the pinnacle. Turbo Pascal and Borland Pascal also existed.

Borland C/C++ 3.1 was a better product, arguably the pinnacle of Borland DOS IDEs. It was the largest and heaviest retail software package of all time: 30 lbs / 13 kg roughly. It contained a library of books for C and C++, x86 assembly, assembly instruction quick reference manual, debugging, profiling, text UI programming, OWL 1.0, and the Windows API. Borland C/C++ included Turbo Profiler, Turbo Assembler, and Turbo Debugger. It was the last DOS-based TUI editor as 4.0 switched to mostly Windowsu-centric tooling. Borland C/C++ included, IIRC, a trial DOS extender to develop protected mode programs since most DOS programs were real-mode targets. If you wanted a good DOS extender like Phar Lap or Tenberry DOS/4GW, those were pricey and uncommon to average broke coder enthusiasts. Watcom C/C++ (10.6 was about the best) included a trial of DOS/4GW.

Turbo/Borland Pascal had TurboVision for TUI development.

Modern Free Pascal arguably has more available compilation targets than GCC or CLang/LLVM has or ever will.

https://openwatcom.org

https://github.com/magiblot/tvision

You missed the 16 bit Windows versions of them.

Turbo Pascal for Windows existed until version 1.5, then replaced with Delphi, used Object Windows Library.

Turbo C++ and Borland C++ for Windows existed until version 4.0, then replaced with C++ Builder, also used Object Windows Library.

Delphi and C++ Builder introduced the VCL, written in Delphi.

Purposely. I was talking about DOS-based IDEs. Borland C/C++ >3 and Borland Pascal >7 were Windows based. After Borland jumped on the Windows train, the UX was ruined forever.

The link in the post to NTVDMx64 at Columbia seems to be broken, but the associated GitHub project appears to be at https://github.com/leecher1337/ntvdmx64

  "What is it?
  ===========
  NTVDMx64 is a port of the well-known Windows NTVDM, which is used by windows 
  to run DOS-Applications, to 64bit Windows, so that you can run your 
  DOS-Applications on 64bit Windows too."

Something I had wanted and didn't know existed!

https://web.archive.org/web/20230315024557/http://www.columb...

Or just run dosbox for full and isolated emulation.

Full circle, there's also djgpp and openwatcom for semi-modern retro development.

https://www.delorie.com/djgpp

https://openwatcom.org

I collect retro compilers, programming books, software, and hardware.

From what I gather chatting with coworkers, Turbo C and Turbo C++ are still widely used in schools and universities across India.

I can vouch for that. Not in my Uni, but my school did introduced us to programming via Turbo C++.

Earlier, yes like 10 years ago. Not now. Kids are learning python as introductory programming language

I can assure you there are "modern" uploads of Turbo C++ into You Tube.

For people doing embedded development using MSDOS (which plenty of people did back in the day) Borland C/C++ version 3.1 was the gold standard of IDE and compiler tools. Turbo Debugger using two displays (one was a monochrome display - remember those?) was incredible. I still have a copy archived for safe keeping.

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