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64 Comments
- absmith1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+17Pascal was the last language I knew well enough to actually use, and I loved Turbo Pascal. Damn, I'm old.
- b403, on 10/12/2007, -1/+17uses crt;
begin
clrscr;
textcolor(14);
writeln('Good times, Pascal. Good times.');
readkey;
end. - tranquilize, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13ever heard of delphi?
- eclectro, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13Ditto II
As the article states the first turbo pascal complier cost $49. They are asking x10 as much by charging $500 at a time when Microsoft has been known to hand out copies of theirs gratis if you are in the loop. I think that Borland is still not in touch with it's roots.
Also, I am thinking of returning to pascal as I think it would be less of a bug hunt than C++ and more secure with less buffer overflows. What does the digg crowd think? - Superc00kie, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10Now that's good news! I've always been a fan of Borland compilers. Turbo Pascal was the first compiler I ever used. Also cool that they have a free version; Delphi was beginning to get very expensive.
- elmonty, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11Yahooooooo! Borland finally remembers how it got big in the first place.
- alastria, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Awesome! As a small-fry Windows developer, I get to use any language I want. And I've always used Pascal/Delphi because it just makes sense ...
... unlike C++. How C and C-based languages ended up on top, I'll never know. For instance, things that get caught as compile-time errors in Pascal get compiled no-prob in C, and you're left wondering what happened. Like:
for (I = 1; I = 10; I++) { ... }
You forgot to use "=="! Now you're screwed! Not to mention that Pascal source code is just more readable.
And it was true that Delphi was getting a little out of my price range, so this rocks. - antyg, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8I thought it was just me!
it's so good to be finally out of the closet! I loved turbo pascal!!!
ahhhh, my first love ;) - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Don't shoot me if I'm wrong but I *think* turbo Pascal came out in 1985.
Turbo Pascal lived through 7 versions but it just didn't do well in the Windows environment.
There were a other programming products that were very good: turbo C, turbo assembler and turbo debugger.
Borland had "the eighties disease". They wanted to buy everything in sight and become the uber-corp. They bought Ashton-tate (of DB2 & DB3 fame) and sought to release Dbase IV which sucked out loud.
They met the 1990s in deep trouble. They sacked their idiot CEO and have been creeping out of the hole ever since.
Borland made the classic mistake: they tried to be everything BUT what they were- a maker of excellent programming tools. If they stick to what they're good at, they just might be be somebody- again. - illegalchuck, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6I learned Turbo Pascal on an IBM PC with 512K RAM and 20MB hard drive. That seems like a hundred years ago.
- SpacePope, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Pascal was the first programming language I ever learned. Good times, I loved Turbo Pascal 6.0 IDE, lotsa fun memories competing with my buddies like who writes a program that scares the most crap out of whoever runs it or best looking prog or most fun games.. text based rpg's seemed to be the easiest :P .. somehow we never bothered with any useful programs
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5They facts are Borland expressed their interest in divulging itself from their developer tools/IDE product division. This translates into they are looking to sell off these assets. What it doesn't mean is that they are going to bury their tools, it means they want to position their tools to be attractive for another company to buy the division.
- zclip, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7Ditto!
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Oh great. Now what do I do with $1000 bucks worth of Delphi???
Maybe it's worth the pain if Pascal makes a come back. The C++ geeks are getting extremely too pleased with themselves. - ntufar, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5It was Turbo Assembler (TASM) and Turbo Linker (TLINK) that I used extensively.
Microsoft used to produce Macro Assembler (MASM) at the day but it was nothing like IBM Macro Assembler used to this days on IBM Mainframes.
I used TASM exclusively.
Turbo C 2.0 also was a solid and reliable IDE, I used it a lot.
And Turbo Basic! Turbo Basic was able to compile your code into .EXE file as opposed to inferior Microsoft's GWBASIC or QBASIC, - phenolholic, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6pascal owned! that was my first and only programming language. i loooooooved it! i was really good at it, coding day and night in true coding spirit. then, i learned all the troubles of learning turbo pascal went to use when c/c++ became the standard. i dabbled with c, but eventually gave up since i didnt want to go through the learning curve. i remember a simple program that killed our LAN at school. i created a file and filled it with a bunch of junk data and kept appending to it and filling it up. it got so big it used up the entire hdd on the schools LAN and lagged it to the point of nonexistant. man those were the days!
- jma06, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4> As the article states the first turbo pascal complier cost $49. They are asking x10 as much by charging $500 at a time when Microsoft has been known to hand out copies of theirs gratis if you are in the loop. I think that Borland is still not in touch with it's roots.
RTA. They say they have a free version, just like Visual Studio 2005 Express.
BUT, somehow this feels too good to be true. Maybe it is the half baked web site, I just don't seem to trust this. This does not feel like Borland at all.
More strange news from Borland today.
Borland set to sell IDE business
http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/02/08/75171_HNborlandexitide_1.html
I am begining to wonder if this is some elaborate hoax. - DarkElf109, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Hahaha...My high school still teaches Pascal in Intro to Programming...
- jleejlee, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4The new Turbo versions are free (Explorer version) or under $500 (Pro version) and the products are single language products for Pascal, C++, C#, and Delphi .NET. Yes, they are a response to Microsoft giving away lame/worthless versions of VS2005.
- b403, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5or tpc for linux?
- sremick, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I can't believe no one has mentioned Free Pascal yet:
http://www.freepascal.org/
I dusted off my Pascal skills and actually used Free Pascal for a real-world serious project. It worked like a charm. Very nostalgic... having used Turbo Pascal tons when I was younger, I felt right at home. It's also available for alternative OSes. - robognome, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4QuickBasic, et al came much later than the original Turbo Pascal. In fact the original Turbo Pascal was available for CP/M. (CP who??) I used it to program CP/M programs on a Z80 microprocessor.
That said this just looks like another "me too" move from Borland -- an answer to Microsoft's Visual Studio Express editions. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Kylix is the Borland development environment for Linux.
Borland has always been way ahead of the curve. They were the first company to put a compiler inside an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). What's really impressive about that is that they did it at a time when a really hot PC would have a 80286-25, maybe a MB of RAM and 20 megabytes of hard drive space. OH- and they did it for 50 to 150 bucks a pop.
Their competetors at the time had command line compilers that cost between 500-2500. Microsoft Fortran 4.0 for MS-DOS (~1987) cost ~600 and shipped with a list of 1200 known bugs.
This was an era when code had to be tight, efficent, memory was measured in Kilobytes and you had to pay attention to how much disk space you use.
Contrast this to today's bloated and error prone code. If that's progress, it is leaving me feeling very nostalgic. - ricree, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Lucky. I wish my high school would've had programming classes.
- thomash, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4I learned turbo pascal on a Chinese abacus using twenty beads and five rods. I modded that thing myself using an original Rudolf Diesel engine.
You tell the young people of today and they won't believe you. - hackwrench, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3"Typical programming language compilers of the day were expensive, unwieldy, and unfriendly."
Can somebody give a picture of the timeline here? What about QuickBASIC Quick C and Quick Assembler? - concept03, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@jma06
>> "More strange news from Borland today.
>> Borland set to sell IDE business
>> http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/02/08/75171_HNborlandexitide_1.html"
That article was written Feb 8 2006. Very old news. - jleejlee, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Also, Borland is focusing on ALM (application lifecycle management) services to large corporations and not developers anymore, so they are spinning off the Developer Tools Group into a new company that *IS* focused directly on developers large and small. It is this new company (named "DevCo" in the interim) that is committed to us - the developers.
The development tools were NEVER "shelved", sunsetted, or otherwise abandoned in any way, shape, or form--contrary to some ads by other developer companies engaging in disinformation. - flash200, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3They changed their name to Inprise in 1998 and changed it back to Borland in 2001. It's remained essentially the same company.
I used to live in Santa Cruz, and worked for a year with a former Borland'er from the Scotts Valley office. At the time, the Scotts Valley office was where the bulk of their IDE work was done (in other words, the old office was still where the "old Borland", the IDE part of the company, was located).
They also have an office in Cupertino, but I'm finding conflicting information about which location is their corporate headquarters. - Moocha, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Somehow people seem to not have noticed that the free Explorer versions will NOT support adding any components to the component palette except those already included with it.
Yes, you can get by without the visual support, but it can be very tedious.
So it's a nice thing (especially for Pascal where Microsoft does not compete directly), but I hope Borland won't expect anyone to use their .NET based tools when Microsoft gives away its Express editions for free... - scottc, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3My programming career was launched using Turbo Pascal 1.0 on a Kaypro "portable" computer. Somewhere around here I have a printout of the source code from that first program I sold.
- flash200, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I'm a bit confused. From Wikipedia: "On February 8, 2006 Borland announced the divestiture of their IDE division, including Delphi, JBuilder, and InterBase."
I thought that meant they were no longer going to be making compilers. Did they spin off their IDE division as a separate company, or sell it to another company, or did nothing actually change? - lsk2000, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I like delphi,wish to borland.
- boogienights, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3You're right, this doesn't sound like Borland. Thank God. The part of the company that has been creating fantastic programming tools for more than two decades is being spun off from the lead weight of their "Enterprise" division.
There were hints about a Turbo version in the last update for the BDS (Borland Development Studio) 2006, and more hints from excited members of "DevCo", as the nascent company is calling itself, that they were going back to their roots. - DelphiKen, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Yes, in Delphi, by using the TThread class or by directly using CreateThread(), BeginThread(), etc. from the Win32 API.
- unoacaso, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Borland press release and product(s) site
http://www.turboexplorer.com/TurbosPressRelease.htm - hackwrench, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2QBASIC came out after QuickBASIC which was able to compile to EXE
- bloodguard, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Neat. I remember using Turbo Pascal on CP/M (get off my lawn) and DOS back in the early 80's. I wish they'd spin out some PHP tools. A well done PHP IDE and integrated debugger would be great (zend studio is teh suck and phpeclipse is still pretty shaky).
- jetsfandb, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Yes, its the same company as the original Borland. I think they switched back when either the name switch didn't achieve the desired effect or they realized the brand identity of Borland was more valuable.
- raindog469, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2jma, you'll have to pony up around $500 for the pro version if you want to use third party components, according to TFA....
- 2ker, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Yeah, and instead of loop that doesn't execute even once, you have loop that loops forever... but who wants a loop than do not loop anyway? ;)
Pascal rockz, C ownz ;P - charlietuna, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Borland.. errr Inprise.. no wait I mean Borland is finally doing the right thing? We'll see if they have their stuff together. We need some simple tools that don't involve hundreds of megabytes of development support stuff which we might not use. Anyone try to download the free MSVC++ component of their development studio sans C#? A nightmare to avoid all that other stuff while using MS.
- tessex, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1 I was at Borland's original product announcement for C++. They had stacks of the product setting on tables all around. At the end of the presentation, they told us all to take a copy, for FREE!! Now that's my kind of product announcement! (Wonder if we could convince Ford or GM to do something like that?)
- NickHodges, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2You can't get any cheaper than free. The TurboExplorer versions are going to be /free/.
- brsly, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2It wasn't the first compiler I used, but they were available many years for a free download until this broke at:
http://bdn.borland.com/museum - newbambory, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I don't believe much of what Borland says or does, not just because they are lying, but also because they really don't know which direction they should take. Lack of vision, ambition and commitment combined with their desire to make more money, no matter how, and with no respect for the long-term interests, makes Borland what it is as opposed to what it was during its golden ages.
I expect this Turbo hype to cease anytime just like BuilderX did.
Borland is a lousy liar. Their latest lie is that they want to concentrate on ALM so they are selling the IDE tools. Couldn't they just make a subsidiary of the IDE tools with separate accounting and leadership? As if Borland consists of one man and he can't concentrate on both lines of tools. - TomBacker, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1As to the last point, that is exactly what is happening, the Turbo tools are being generated by a subgroup of Borland, which is in the process of being established as a separate company. And I do not think that they are liars, nor that the announcement is hype.
- spgilmore, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0The museum link still works. Just click the link, pick the article for the IDE you want, and read the document under the section "How to download". There is a link in the first sentence.
- jma06, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1> That article was written Feb 8 2006. Very old news.
Ah! My mistake. I must have read it wrong.
Anyway, I hope it is true. No one ever made an IDE like Borland for native languages. Not even close. I have Delphi 6. I use "Python for Delphi" which integrates seamlessly. It's programming Zen for productivity, speed and just plain fun. I hope who ever buys their IDE business makes an IDE for more sophisticated languages like ML.
The nice thing about Delphi is that it's component programming at it's finest. There are literally thousands of free (and commercial) components in one of the many community repositories. And that is not counting ActiveX and .NET components. JavaBeans despite the overwhelming popularity of Java somehow utterly fail when it comes to drag and drop component availability. Java probably has less free visual beans available today than Delphi 2 did. VCL was powerful but never complicated simple things like Swing tends to do. And I would rather layout forms in old Delphi 6 than NetBeans Mantissa. - Reston, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I am confused by the fact that Borland became Enprise several years ago, who is Borland now? the same group of guys from Scott's Valley Ca, or others.
TP was widely distributed by 1984, that and Sidekick were staples of my system back then. -
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