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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.
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
Not yet, but maybe you can add it for him :).
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
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.
... Is that there are now free useable *16bit* compilers out on the net. I hope the FreeDOS guys take notice...
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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!
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
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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.
I looked around a bit at lotus.com and couldn't find it. You wouldn't still have a link?
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
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
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)
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.
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).
:-P
This would be kinda like Microsoft giving away Windows 3.1 (whoop1)
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
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
Not illegal, if you ever legally owned (and did not sell) a copy of Windows 1.0
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
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
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
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 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.
...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