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Borland Releases Old Turbo C, Turbo Pascal for Free
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.
I've got the 2.0 disks and manuals. If you want them, Ricochet, let me know!
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
http://members.primary.net/~cholo wat/utility.html
You can even get Windows 1.x! You can't say Microsoft hasn't made some progress.
-Joe
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.
--
Gleepy the Hen. More intelligent than the average hen.
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).
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... :-)
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?
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
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.
...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.
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
Snipes...
:)
wow that brings up old memories.. what a great game. I wonder if there is a TCP/IP version out?
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
Not yet, but maybe you can add it for him :).
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
As far as I can tell, their website contains only zip files containg the original contents of the disks.
.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)
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
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!")
-Ilya Haykinson
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!!!
Gee, I wonder if they're all why-too-kay compliant? Somehow, I doubt we'll get support from the vendor...
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)
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
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
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
... 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 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.
æeee!
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!
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.
TedC
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.
Well, that's not such a big deal. There are actually tons of BBS programs written in Pascal. For example: WWIV (originally), Telegard, Renegade, RemoteAccess... and tons of others I can't think of right now.
A little while ago I downloaded a commodore 64 emulator and fired it up (I haven't seen one in at least 10+ years). Tried to remember some of the commands and when I went to type: LOAD "whatever"
I *naturaly* (w/o even thinking about it) hit SHIFT-2... that freaked me out =)
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.
Yes!!!
Wouldn't you know that I was thinking about that game a month or two ago, did some searching, and found out that 1) it's been ported to Linux and 2) it's still available for DOS! I just played the DOS version last night; boy, does it bring back memories...
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
Favorite
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!
-Cheetah
Still have it, including original docs and disks, along with a few aftermarket books... Talk about memories... :)
I spent much of my youth in front of Turbo Pascal. Wrote a good deal of stuff in it, too - including a sort of office suite! Wasn't exactly easy, but hell, it was a lot of fun. Wonderful environment (to this day I use "joe" because I remember all the keystrokes, hehehe).
The point, I think, is that for writing a quick program that doesn't need to do a lot of GUI crap, MSVC is extremely inconvienient and slow compared to Turbo C.
Even funnier, to this day I use "joe" as my quick-n-dirty text editor because I have all the keystrokes memorized! Ha!
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(?).
"Dogs and cats, living together...it's mass hysteria!"
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?!?
Turbo Pascal was a beautiful compiler. Fast and easy. Ah.. those were the DOS days..
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.
--
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
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.
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....
Did a lot of COBOL programming using WordStar.
Great editor!!!
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
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.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I was under the impression that all the "Turbo" compilers were so fast because they didn't do any optimizations. Was that the case?
Snipes was passe...
"hunt" is where it's at - it could even be played over MODEM!!!
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
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?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Sure. It's called "Quake."
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.
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.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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.
Dyslexics Untie!
I guess if I ever have to take a C class again I'll have Turbo C on my HP100LX. ;-)
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:
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...
:). Now I'm going to bring it home, and install it.
:)
:)
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.
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...
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
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 :)
...didn't we all have an illegal copy of :) :)
Turbo Pascal on our 8086 at home anyway?
ohhh and i loved inline assembler
Ricardo.
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!)...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
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.
-- Julien Pierre http://www.madbrain.com/blog
Yes, a lot of BBS programs were written in Pascal
and I've seen the source for a lot of them. If
you look carefully you'll notice a lot of these
all go back to one system and different people
hacked the source for what they wanted (I believe
the system was called Forum) Anybody see the
source for Vision/X and LSD BBS? Those are Pascal hacks
too. I believe later versions of WWIV are written
in C however. I'm pretty sure the compiler they
used was Turbo C though.
PPL? Are you referring to that byte-compiled language
used by PCBoard? That was certainly a very
powerful langauge for coding little apps.
And Sun claims Java was innovative, but this
little company and probably others already had
byte-compiled language with integrated support
for many things that a connected system uses such
as mail and message boards.
Hmm, Turbo Pascal, dos emu, party like it's 1989!
Actually, I _LOVED_ turbo pascal. I coded a whole bunch of demos, using some freeware vesa and sound blaster libs and a mouse driver.. I also found another free turbo pascal 7 compatible compiler. Now I can get dosemu working and go back to good ole days.
I just fell in love with Turbo Pascal 3 the first time I used it. That was the first dev tool I used under DOS. Before that I'd used BASIC on a computer called BBC Micro -- a 6502-based system that ran at 1 MHz and had 32 KB RAM. If I remember right, TP was a 40 KB COM file that had an integrated editor *and* a compiler. Amazing what it could do! I think Borland scaled great heights with TP 5.5. Units rocked. Their online help system was too good. The compiler used to be so fast on my NEC V20-based XT clone, that I used to used to repeatedly compile and and let the IDE move to the error position for errors like misspelled variables which I could have found and fixed myself.
Ahhhh, the good old days!
I tracked down a copy of the *original* advertisement that Borland used to launch Turbo Pascal. Legend has it that BYTE magazine agreed to run the ad on credit because Kahn sweet-talked then into it. I scanned in copy from the Nov 1983 issue of BYTE. See http://www.ece.utexas.edu/~ranga/ads/borland.html
Gee, um, I've still got TC 3.0 installed on my DOS development machine. Not *hardly* useless, not by a longshot.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
What about Xenix/86 ?
(even if without source code)
Hehe.. Yes, Pascal is great for writing BBS door games. I wrote several door games and utilities myself. It was cool.
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/
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
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.
-- Julien Pierre http://www.madbrain.com/blog
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
---
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
True Story: 7Hz is the resonant frequency of a chicken's skull cavity. This was determined empirically in Australia, where a new factory generating 7Hz tones was located too close to a chicken ranch: When the factory started up, all the chickens died.
-- Turbo C++ 3.0 for DOS Help File, section on the sound() function.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).
Tweet, tweet.
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)
Tweet, tweet.
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
If you take the Turbo C v.2.0 directory tree, help files and all, and zip it up, it fits on a single floppy disc. A 1.44 MB or 1.2 MB floppy, that is, it won't fit on a 360K floppy! (The original install discs are 360KB.) The .ZIP file is 1,011,123 bytes.
Comparing the \TC directory with the \Program Files\DevStudio directory (VC++ 5) I get: TC, 108 files, 4 dirs, 2,120,036 bytes; VC5, 3051 files, 111 dirs, 370,930,189 bytes.
I bought Turbo C v.2.0 in 1989 or so. I've still got the original paperback manuals. I sure got my money's worth out of that package; I still use it pretty frequently, on systems from my Pentium II desktop all the way up to my favorite and best PC, a ten-ounce HP200 handheld DOS machine that runs on two AA batteries.
Unfortunately Perl won't run on the XT-class (80186 processor) HP200, so I have to use either Turbo C or XLISP when I need to bang out a hack on that platform.
All I want for Christmas is a library for Turbo C v.2.0 that allows me to use VFAT long file names.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
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
alexc
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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.
Too often today we have the opposite: programs which are amazing for how slow they can make awesome hardware seem. Programmers today should study these classic programs -- they'd learn something.
Are you sure you don't mean TC++ 3.0?
Asimov Apple II disk image archive
Yay- Choplifter! Now, if only we had some stuff like Opcode's original (system 6, monochrome) version of Musicshop- that sort of thing, effective but really old programs on the Mac side, because currently I can't legally make Pluses and Classics into little MIDI sequencers and give them away as such...
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.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
I have tonnes of old sourcecode i can't compile :)
because my TurboC Diskettes are broken
Now i can hehe...
If you look closer at the original shipdates, you will notice that all of that software is at least (and some quite exactly) 10 years old. So we have to wait a bit for TC3, which is the compiler I started with. It really had a killer feature: Click with the right mouse button on a library function name and you get the online help ;]
Xenix/86 was written by Microsoft. The license was probably transferred to SCO when they became a separate company, though.
Screw my Linux development, it's the year of the Portfolio again! 128k RAM! Yeehaw!
RinkRat
Anyone doing embedded programming should realize
that Borland C++ 3.0 and 3.1 are the very best
for any programming on 80C186 and those like
me who have some of those V25 left.
This is also the last stable version to run
on dos. Version 4.5 switched to graphic so
I never bothered to update.
not me :P
:)
I need a good win3.1 instilation... I wonder if I can get 1.x to run in 9x dos box....
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Comparing the \TC directory with the \Program Files\DevStudio directory (VC++ 5) I get: TC, 108 files, 4 dirs, 2,120,036 bytes; VC5, 3051 files, 111 dirs, 370,930,189 bytes.
:)
most of that is the online documentation, (175 megs) witch is *very* usefull
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
ahahahahahahahhah, that's, just... hehe :)
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Well, my best gues is, they don't give a fuck at all. My guess is you can do anything with these files that you could do with old shareware files that you want.
what I'd *really* like to see is TurboAssembler, I used to have a copy of 1.0, and someone gave me 3.0 but I never used it. I think I still have 1 installed on my rebuilt 386. since it's assembly you could target whatever you wanted (I know you could do windows programs...)
I really missed out on all this good stuff, I got my first PC just a few months before windows 95 came out (I had to work a summer job to pay for it) so I only got a few months of "real" dos (I rebult my 386 from spare parts, the only OS it's ever run is win95's DOSmode). It was fun, but win9x is really what I'm used to. I got slackware (a linux distro) going in 96, but I never did anything with it.
I really wish i could have gotten into that whole BBS sceen and stuff when I was a kid. there's a certan joy in using a pure modem connection instaid of a strate internet connection. it's like the diffrence between listening to a radio show, and watching TV. the only game I've ever played over a modem was starcraft...
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Scorched Earth is still around...I have a copy that came off of IRC (all those warez idiots trade it around because it's small and gets them credit on ratio servers).
There's a farily new game called Worms that is basically a pretty version of Scorch, and a sequel called Worms II : Armageddon (I think)
Or, you could just play Gorillas, the game that usually came with Qbasic.
I have a disassembler for turbo pascal v3. Feed it the com file and out comes fully documented source. Magic stuff. It used to be advertised in Dr Dobbs (or was that Mirocornicopia).
It came with the as assembler by Pascal Dormier(?). This assembler was about 10kb, including a full screen editor. It assembled the source code faster than Dos did a file copy.
Muscle memory, I tell ya..how many *()@ing times did you type that?
sys64738
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.
My friend is still a great fan of this really lovely BASIC compiler (I don't normally use BASIC myself). Why can't they release TB for free too (it's gotta be older than TP)?
The first piece of Windows software I actually paid for was Turbo Pascal 4. I loved it. In fact, years later I was still resisting Windows' ubiquity because of all those cool windowing modules I'd built over the years. I've still got those glossy developer magazinettes Borland sent out.
All those units are still on (5.25) diskettes... I suggest we form a movement to abandon all GUIs. Back to basics, that's what the software world needs. This obsession with prettifying data means that not only are we paying less attention to the contents and more to the presentation, but I'm not able to use my pop-up boxes with cool shadows that darken the characters underneath.
...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.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com