Borland Turbo Basic

There's a lot more that can be said about this:

1. If you've ever heard of TurboVision, this UI is similar to it. But actual TurboVision as it was later to be found in Borland programs, and as even can be found in clones today, did not have this look and feel, which would have seemed a little clunky for a TUI by the end of the 1980s.

1. Notice that F1 is already help, but the other function keys do not follow the CUA pattern that was only actually formalized that same year.

1. Notice the differently coloured letters for the shortcut keys for menu entries, something that has largely vanished nowadays.

1. Notice how wasteful of 80×25 area some of the windows are. It was not long before everyone had shrunk the application menu down to 1 row. Conversely, though, look how colour is used to demarcate function key names, rather than using square brackets.

1. Scroll Lock is actually a major part of the user interface. A number of MC/PC/DR-DOS programs at the time gave a use to Scroll Lock. In Turbo BASIC, it switched (as it says in the screen shot) into and out of a mode where the arrow keys moved/resized things.

Like a lot of 90s kids my first language was BASIC via QBasic. After feeling like I had outgrown that I went looking for a "real" language to learn and landed on C++. The cost of Borland Turbo C++ 4.5 for a young kid, and my parents not being into computers so not keen on funding me, led me to ask for alternatives on IRC. I was told about [GNU/]Linux coming with a C/C++ compiler for free! I ordered a Red Hat CDROM from cheap*bytes and never looked back.

Had Borland not been so expensive or had the stranger on IRC known or told me GCC existed for DOS/Windows who knows where my career would be today.

In a weird way though I never used it, hearing about Borland Turbo anything still makes me happy because it reminds me of something I thought was unobtainium.

Imagine going back in time to late-80s/early-90s, and vividly describing all the tools we have now to folks back then -- coding agents, loops, autonomous multi-hour agentic workflows, automated testing, and PRs, and whatnot. Wonder what their reaction would be.

I sometimes look at my pre-2024 workflows and feel like I'm looking at a caveman's toolchain. Absolutely bonkers as to how quickly we humans adapt to things.

Also, neat bit of trivia: Borland was originally named MIT ("Market In Time"). The OG MIT in Cambridge, MA, sent a trademark letter and they then changed their name to Borland, which was supposedly a client of theirs.

I absolutely loved the help docs that came in Borland products. To this day they are my gold standard of documentation and nothing has ever meet them. I learned so much simply navigating their docs. The best part was that they had actual examples that you could see it working, copy/paste modify. To an extent, a taste of open source.

I graduated quickly from Borland Turbo Basic to Turbo Pascal, and really wish I'd bothered to hold onto all those old floppies. I do still have a Visual Studio / VSCode color settings file that matches the old look -- I used those colors for a good long time, longer than it took me to stop coding in all caps.

A friend and I built our first "game" in Turbo Basic. It was fairly capable and being able to make an EXE out of a basic program felt like magic when GW-Basic and QBasic were the only other basic's we were had ever used on a PC. Several years later VB for DOS was also pretty impressive with a text-mode form designer.

I was stuck on QBASIC early 90’s. Read all the C++ and assembler books in the library. Buying a compiler was extraordinary expensive (around 4000 dollars in today’s money). So, was left to build myself an assembler and super simple compiler. Good times.

I own it, it was a great introduction to compiled BASIC, on MS-DOS 3.3!

Thus I don't have the same affinity to QBasic, as others do, I had already enjoyed compiled BASIC and systems programming in BASIC by the time MS-DOS 5 came out.

Great memories, and eventually made the jump into Turbo Pascal.

You can try Turbo Pascal (and a few other old coding environment) online here: https://aryx.github.io/ocaml-elm-playground/apps/#programmin...

I found 1.0, a German release, and German Turbo Toolbox here:

https://archive.org/details/000376-BorlandTurboBasic10>

https://archive.org/details/BorlandTurboBasic1.0German

https://archive.org/details/turbotoolbox

In the time I was willing to spend, I did not see a 1.1 release.

I love Borland product design, I always fall back to using their design language in my personal use tools[1].

1. You can see them in my recent submissions. Don't want to shill.

I really miss the old Borland Turbo [*] days, both in terms of the languages and the IDEs. (Turbo BASIC wasn't my first BASIC, but Turbo Pascal and Turbo C were absolutely formative for me.)

VS Code had a little bit of that feel, but it's grown so much and added so many features that it's lost it. And the closest thing I've found to the feeling of writing C in the 90s was Arduino sketches a decade ago.

Borland later killed off the product, Bob took it back from them, and kept releasing new versions of PowerBASIC until he passed away. From what I understand he kept his source repository encrypted and didn't share the details of how to access with anyone, not even his wife, so the product died with him.

Borland Turbo C was a delight! They don't make 'em like that anymore.

A bit of amusing trivia: When Turbo Basic was returned to Bob Zale, he had to choose a new name for the product and made a list of likely candidates to choose from. One of the leading names was rejected once it occurred to Bob how it might be interpreted. It was "Master Basic".

VB5 Pro was one of the best IDE's I have ever used. You could literally write code as you debugged. This sounds dangerous and is, but It helped me understand how programming actually worked. F1 context help was a great idea and super helpful - MS ruined it with MS Developer CD and it was super slow. I decided to get into programming because in Junior college we built a pizza ordering client server and had two IDEs opened in debug mode and you could step through it from client to server. I bought a $2000 computer and VB5 Pro for $55 at a computer show and got into VB Access programming job. Borland was kinda fading away out when I started programming and MS products were taking over the campus.

OT:

Turbo Pascal was just genius, really!

Esp. the lightspeed compile times, and that you could create a redist exe-file to copy your "highly sophisticated games" to your friends and show them, how cool it is :-))

Good ol times!

Are there any good, more modern alternatives to Turbo Basic for people who want to get back into programming in BASIC?

I never knew this existed until today. 1980s me would have loved this.

The coloured shortcut letters in the menus are such a nice touch. Modern apps hide keyboard shortcuts so well that most people never learn them.

They used Turbo Basic in Dbase 3 & 4 as well. It was so useful that Foxpro built a migration tool to port your dbase databases and code to Foxpro. Some of the first floppies I carried with me everywhere were my Dbase databases and basic programs.