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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.
...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.
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