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Borland Announces the Return of the Turbo Products, with Video
Leonel writes "Borland Software's Developer Tools Group just announced the return of the Turbo line of products. With free and cheap versions, it's aimed at students, hobbyist developers, occupational developers and individual programming professionals. More information is available at the the Turbo Explorer website, including a video of the Adventures of TurboMan."
it's aimed at students, hobbyist developers, occupational developers and individual programming professionals. More information is available at the the Turbo Explorer website, including a video of the Adventures of TurboMan.
The adventures of TurboMan? Just to confirm, we are talking about college students, not elementary school, right?
Do these still need two 5.25" floppy drives to run? I'm not sure I remember where mine are.
Last night, I was digging around on the Borland site to see if there was such a thing as this, and today they announce it. How's that for a co-incidence!
:)
I'll certainly be interested to look at these though. Free things are ALWAYS good
Me too.
I still keep a copy of Borland C++ 3.1 (the last DOS version).
It was an awesome IDE, very productive.
Good old days.
(Not that today is less bright, Vim/gcc/gdb has it all, too.)
factor 966971: 966971
TurboProducts return!
With 80% more standards non-compliance.
I learned to program on a dos version of TurboC ... To this day I still prefer the yellow on blue text :)
Interesting that the Borland tools are being released close to the end of the free year of MS's Express line (ending in Nov. I believe). Could Borland be preparing to take on the MS developer tool chain again?
/.) tool chain. It'll be fun to see if Borland can bring anything new and unique to compete with the VS Express Editions.
Considering that Visual Studio is a highly evolved (I know, this is ALWAYS open for debate on
At the time, Borland (or maybe Watcom) had the best C++ compilers. They also had a wonderfully designed library in the form of TurboVision for doing console applications with menus and windows. However, time has passed, GCC is a damned fine compiler and Qt is a superb UI framework (et al). If Borland wanted to join in this game they should have open sourced their compiler a long time ago. Too little, too late I'm afraid.
It's a shame really, Borland were my favourite company, then Philip Kahn left, they changed their name to Inprise and all their top developers went to Microsoft.
Carpe Daemon
Could be really nice having another commercial Windows C++ IDE around. At my workplace we really need an alternative to Visual Studio. In a codebase that's nearly 1,000,000 lines intellisense is insanely slow, completely inaccurate, and honestly just plain annoying. Visual studio randomly crashes, etc. We're in the process of switching to CMake so people can use Eclipse or whatever IDE they want, but Eclipse's CDT is still a bit too young for my tastes. Perhaps Borland's IDE will provide a welcome reprieve and nice debugging.
I would imagine that Borland hopes to boost sales of its higher end lines by giving away the cheap ones and hooking the developers, but they'd better have some super-sweet bait on the end of the hook. There are tons of powerful IDE's, many free. Unless they bring something to the table that is lacking in other products, I can't see them reaching their business objectives.
People are beginning to expect the IDE to be free. Oracle knows this, so does Sun.
Best of luck to Borland. I have fond memories all the way back to Borland C++ 3.x for Windows, and Delphi - ESPECIALLY Delphi.
Delphi ain't your father's Pascal. It's a modern, object-oriented interoperable language. The main advantage isn't the language itself, but the class library (VCL) and the form designer, which is the best tool around to build user interfaces (ask Skype), while still having the ability of having your code neatly encapsulated in classes separated from the presentation layer.
.Net offerings. if that's your language of choice, you can use C++ with the VCL (or for plain WinAPI applications, if you feel inclined).
Anyway, Delphi is only half of the picture here. There's Turbo C++ and C# offerings along with the native Delphi and Delphi for
Basically, the explorer versions are advanced IDEs for these languages, free of change, allowing commercial development. There's your motivation.
Pascal was/is a great learning language. It's not too difficult to comprehend, but it's strong enough that you don't immediately exceed it's capabilities once you "get it."
:= (1 - Expenses / Revenue); ). There's competition now, and most machines owned by hobby-programmers and students will cruise through the compilation process fast enough that the "turbo" brand doesn't offer a compelling solution like it used to. There are OSS solutions available, so the "less expensive" compulsion is gone as well. Back in the day (man, y'all are making me feel old ...) the alternative was the Microsoft compiler that was dog slow and required a manual linking step ... from the command line ... both ways.
... now get the hell off my lawn!
Turbo Pascal was a great because a) it was inexpensive compared to everyone else; and b) it compiled soooo much faster than everyone else. The development environment concept was pretty innovative too, and eliminated much of the command line funkiness. Funny, I didn't Turbo Pascal in the press release - Delphi, C++, C#. I guess you could call Delphi "object Pascal" if you wanted to.
However, this press release stinks of a marketing cash-grab where they try to make a quick buck by squeezing the legacy heritage of a well-known trademark. I just don't see that they're adding any value to the proposition. Some marketroid probably did the math based on "no new development NRE" and was brimming at the huge potential margins on such a re-release (i.e. Margin
Tell Blaise that I still have fond memories
My enterprise was based on Borland C++ in the last 10 years.
But this seems to be the last desperate ad before the collapse: the feature list contains no news at all - all of it should have been in Borland IDEs years ago.
Instead of chewing new buzzwords, the daily used tools should have been cleaned up first: Borland C++ Builder 6 behaves terribly even on medium size projects, (crashes, tons of bugs, etc.)
If Borland had a yearly update, I would be their greatest fun.
If Kylix would have been developed further, I would pay for it, because we need cross-platform Linux tools...
So many dead tools...
Nothing to see here, man, move away... to Qt, for example.
It is today's Borland. And shines.
But because it provides a steady release cycle, people will buy it, even if it is pricey.
These days Borland Developer Studio gives me time to make some coffee.
BUT .Net 1.1? Seriously? We've been at 2.0 for some time now, right? Did Borland just miss that announcement?
FTA:
"the company's Developer Tools Group, WHICH IS UP FOR SALE, is scheduled to announce single-language versions of the components of Borland Developer Studio..."
The "up for sale" bit tells me that what they are doing is trying to drive some good press, boost their stock price a bit, and negotiate a higher selling price.
Like most has-been corporations, they refuse to accept that they are obsolete and out of the running, so they would rather simply inflate their stock prices artifically so they can walk away with a nice chunk of change ans say, "see we didn't fail!" All I can say is, at least they didn't inflate theirs like SCO did!
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
Are these available for download?
:*)
Well, there's that
27 days, 9 hrs, 40 mins, 30 secs
until the Turbo(s) are here!
timer there. Might explain the missing download links.
Tell me when they bring back TurboProlog...
That is all.
I used Delphi, Builder, and Visual Studio - and I found Borland's intellisense much less responsive than the one in the Microsoft IDE.
Although I use it with not-that-complex projects, in my case the difference between speed is evident: it takes forever for the list of relevant options to show up in Borland's IDEs, while in VS the speed at which it shows up and can be used is the same, even after the project grows in complexity.
The saddest poem
Borland was EXTREMELY popular back in the day. They could have OWNED the dev tools space completely. At some point they got too carried away with MBA-related activities, such as branding, enterprise fads du jour, etc and they lost their userbase and fucked up their products. I have used Delphi and C++ Builder extensively. 6-7 years back there was NO decent RAD alternative. The best thing about them was you could drop all the way to the bare metal at any time if you wanted to and you could have RAD capabilities if you needed to deliver stuff quickly.
I feel for Borland, but at this point I think they should fold up their tent and die. They're beyond any hope of recovery, thanks to retarded management and marketing.
Your motivation? How is productivity as a motivation?
Delphi has been my tool of choice for the last 11 years. It remains the
most productive development tool I have used.
Agile processes? Well, the build on a Delphi project is so quick, you
don't have time to fill your coffee cup, much less drink it. So build/test
cycles are fast.
The language is powerful, and a great foundation for those who choose to
move to C#. The learning curve on C#, coming from Delphi, is pretty shallow.
But please, stay with your g++, and those glacially slow builds. I don't
need more competition.
--- Bill
Wow -- what an impressive display of negativity!
I'm sure this product is great, but what is going to attract developers to these IDEs, especially the C# IDE when Microsoft is already giving away Visual Studio Express for free. Although it is lacking some of the features of the full version of Visual Studio for hobbiests and students, the market Borland seems to be trying to attract, these tools are great and free. I think Borland already missed their opportunity here
I love to deploy my packages
We want Brief (remember UnderWare?) back!
The best programmers editor evar! Globsub in a column-marked block? No problemo!
Open source it!
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
I thought that too, but then I double-checked Microsoft's FAQ: Effective April 19th, 2006, all Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions are free permanently. This pricing covers all Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions including Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual C++, Visual J#, and Visual Web Developer as well as all localized versions of Visual Studio Express.
:)
We'll see if they ever update it, though.
But yeah, this sounds like Borland is trying to compete with MS tools. Good for them! I'm all for companies giving a hand to folks who want to learn their tools... especially if we get free stuff out of the deal.
I produce electronic music and write little games. Have a look.
Personally, I'd rather be Insightful, because Funny doesn't get you karma.
Turbo Prolog was a variation of PDC Prolog, a Danish project. It was a compiled Prolog, and in Prolog fashion taught the user to think backwards, a sometimes useful technique. When Turbo Prolog ended, PDC Prolog continued with the product, later morphing it to Visual Prolog. Somewhere, I have them all. See http://www.visual-prolog.com/ - a new version 7 was coincidentally released a week ago, and a free Personal Edition is available.
But some improvements could still possibly qualify for the "turbo" moniker:
I'm actually a *new* Delphi developer. I've only begun using Delphi within the last 3 months, and I'll be honest, I fought using it tooth and nail. I was so certain that C# was so much better in every situation that I wouldn't even consider Delphi. However, we began doing development for some apps that would be run in WinPE, and I decided to fire up Delphi 2006 and give it a whirl.
I was blown away. I created my application in less than 3 days (minus user testing) --- but the best part is that my app was *fast*. Nearly as fast as if it was written in C/C++. My app was moderately complex (or at least not of the 'hello world' variety), performing user authentication via SOAP connection, connectivity to SQL database and record inserts, XML parsing, and multiple forms.
I have to admit, being able to code Win32 with drag/drop components that just work is refreshing. All without a framework or DLL runtime requirement. I am a Delphi convert, and plan to continue using Delphi to develop Win32 apps. However, I'm not a zealot and I know that C# has it's place and I plan to continue using it where it makes sense.
The more tools that a developer can have in their toolbox, the better.
I don't get it. Why does everyone want new tools all the time. Windows is still windows, A button is still a button and the communication protocols are supported accross the development platforms.
.net platform leaves them with very little working power. There all stressed and tearing their hair out when a server spits blood because they can't see inside!
I have been working with Delphi since version 3 and still tackle new projects today with Delphi 6 (Don't want the newer and slower Visual Studio lookalike IDE).
Here at work I am cracking up lauging these days. Most of the dev team have moved to gadget-land using Visual Studio and C#. As a result they need to upgrade all the dev machines (Again) and find out that the resources sucked up by the bloatware
In the mean time our old and trusty properly hand coded applications keep scaling up on ever more powerful hardware showing there is many more years of use in the old and proven.
I believe I am more productive using Delphi today than a whole line up of fancy Microsoft fanboy developers because I have access to absolutely amazing free library source code build and refined by users over the years. A massive Delphi and Windows API knowledge base indexed by Google newsgroups, a solid grounded knowledge of my tools and libraries and last but not least a very supportive Delphi user base.
I hope this Turbo initiative will bring more developers to their senses and start coding again instead of playing with shiny black box Microsoft crap.
Your right, there is no room for a company that produces fast, native Windows applications any more. Let's all bloat our apps with .NET/Java/etc. Runtime "engines", "frameworks", "environments" etc. are THE way to go. Sheesh, nobody uses Windows anymore--well, except for 90% of the planet.
I started using Delphi a bit late in the game. A few years ago I chose Delphi 6 because it looked pretty decent and I liked the way it simplified the Win32 API in such a way that we could get to developing software without too much hassle. Delphi 7 came along which I passed over because I wanted to wait for Delphi 8 and jump on the .NET bandwagon. When Delphi 8 came out I bought it...
.NET haters who constantly preach about how they don't use dot garbage and claim that native code is the best. My reply to those people is that if you don't understand the advantages of .NET over native code then you have no business writing software.
... again.
... which was the biggest mistake I ever made. Delphi 8 was a such a POS I was shocked that people actually released software that bad. Like they say in Southpark, "You see, I learned a lesson today..." and boy did I learn it good.
Ever since then Borland has been spiralling downwards into oblivion. Their best engineers walked out causing them to lag behind never being able to catch up again. Delphi 2005 was a POS and Delphi 2006 needed a couple patches before it actually worked. I never even bothered to upgrade and no I haven't tried the demos and no I don't give a shit.
I regulary check out the borland.public.delphi.non-technical to see what's going on in Delphiland. Half the comments are from
The other half of the comments are from the Delphi evangelists clinging on to the vain hope that Delphi will some day come back to its glory days and be the top IDE once more. All I can say to them is... can you feel the water around your ankles yet?
The only chance that Delphi has is pure and unconditional open source. I've suggested open sourcing Delphi several times but always my suggestions have fallen on deaf ears. I get short-sighted replies such as "and how can Borland earn their money"? and "oooh.. I hope not!". Too bad because it's been proven time and again that money can be made with Open Source and Borland is precisely at the right time at the right place to pull it off. Oh well, I guess they're going to miss the boat
END OF RANT
No, they're not bringing back Turbo Pascal. They're just rebranding Delphi and Delphi-based products as "Turbo".
Hearken, ye, to a Borland survior. (I wrote a good chunk of the API documentation in Delphi, C++Builder, and Kylix.) Borland somehow has always been run by people who know jack about managing other people. They can't implement the most basic corporate policies, like making people work on the stuff they were actually assigned to work on. So they fall back on Stupid Executive Tricks that they picked up at some seminar somewhere. When I was there, management was in love with "lifecycle management" tools, and actually acquired two vendors of them, neither of which actually had a usable product. But most often, the SET consists of simple-minded rebranding. Usually, it's just pointless, like bringing back "Turbo". But sometimes, they really screw up, like when they renamed the company "Inprise".
Hate to say it, but Borland's pretty much irrelevent. Their last serious achievement was Kylix, which took too long to get out the door, and which targeted a market (Linux desktop developers) that turned out to be nonexistant. And that was 5 years ago! Since then, most of their key people have moved on, and their tools group has stagnated. The fact that management thinks they can sell it just shows how clueless they are.
Delphi is still my favorite development environment. Or rather it would be, if I could bear to use it. Which I can't — it's just too depressing.
Does it still use pascal's weird funky operators chosen simply to be different from other languages?
Sorry, I don't have a clue what you're referring to. Delphi uses Pascal's perfectly commonplace operators chosen to be similar to myriad other Algol-derived or -inspired languages.
Just because you've never dared stray from braces languages doesn't mean that any other convention is "weird", "funky", or deliberately contrary, you know.
It's the countdown to t_time overflow. (it's a 7-bit product)
I'm not sure how Borland will compete with Micro$oft for the student market. Students whose departments participate in the Microsoft Distribution Network Academic Alliance, get free versions of Visual Studio 2005 Professional, along with loads of other M$ software. Granted, it is for non-commercial use but they are full, un-crippled versions. I know, some would say that all M$ software is crippled, but you know what I mean.
My students are instructed to bring CD-R's the first week of class so they can get their free VS 2005 Pro. I used to use Borland's Turbo products, many years ago when I was first starting out in college. I don't remember how much I payed for them but I do remember them being student friendly.
How is Borland going to compete when college departments can pay $799 for the first year and $399 for each additional year of the MSDNAA and be able to give their students thousands of dollars worth of free software as well as install that software for free in their labs?
Setting his threshold to 5, Sparky eliminated most of the trolls on /.
FWIW, I was a college freshman and my first programming class was "Programming Concepts Using Pascal". Rather than use the university's mini-computer (horrible edit and compile environment), I wanted something I could use on a PC. Other Pascal compilers at that time were prohibitively priced for a student at hundreds/thousands of dollars. A friend pointed me to Turbo Pascal and I bought my own copy at Egghead for under $90. My very first software purchase by the way. I was a loyal fan following the product line from TP3->TP4->TC1->TC2->TP5->TC++1->BC++2->BC++4->BC5+ +.
With every iteration, they got a little more expensive even for loyal customers. Then they brought out the "Professional" versions and wanted more money - so I stopped.
How does this relate? TP3 let me do everything and anything I wanted (no-nonsense license) at an expensive (for me) but reasonable price. For the hobbyist or beginner, they will get frustated very quickly with the limitations imposed by the free editions but balk at paying $500 for a professional license. Offer them the professional level software with a no-nonsense license for $99 and Borland may see things turn around.
Apparently Borland is a company that doesn't really know what they want and are with a blurred strategy! At some point in time they decide to wash away the name they built and their long lasting achievements. And a couple of years later they are longing to the return of the very old days! They are in the business of building excellent (really excellent) development environments and gaining enormous acceptance and market share and then abandoning their products/names as if it has never bee theirs!!!
No, I use it in Linux all the time. FreePascal and Lazarus are being actively developed and are very powerful. Most code you wrote in Delphi/Kylix can be compiled (most of the time with little or no changes) with FPC with the delphi mode compiler directive turned on.
Microsoft started offering top people $1m/year salaries to snag them. While this seems like the market working, it's not quite real when Microsoft can use its massive cash reserves to cripple a company. Basically, if Microsoft can offer 20 key people $1m/year over market salaries, then the competition is either bled for $20m/year, which can destroy smaller competition, and hasn't cost Microsoft a dollar, or they spend $20m to put a competitor out of business by stealing key people and use their cash to establish a monopoly position.
This is blatantly anti-trust in the case of a monopolist, and was a lawsuit that I believe Microsoft settled.
Borland made some boneheaded management maneuvers, but this was after Microsoft crippled the company, and Borland made a desperate effort to recover.
Alex