Comment by jgord
10 hours ago
Supercool .. the universe of possibilities really exploded when Borland came out with Turbo Pascal compiler, Turbo C++ and TurboVision.
Compiler performance was superb and the manuals were a work of art - I just wished I had kept all of mine.
This is a cultural treasure.
The manuals were great. I taught myself C/C++ in the early 90s mostly from the big stack of Borland books that came with Turbo C++. It’s hard to imagine learning something like that these days by simply sitting down and reading reference manuals.
Towards that end, I've been trying to put together a list of Literate Programming texts:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/21394355-william-adams...
I really wish that there were more, in particular, I'd dearly love to see a graphical QT (or other up-to-date) GUI app as a Literate Program.
Me as well, as a teenager those manuals were invaluable, it wasn't as if we could easily learn elsewhere.
It was either the manuals, or getting lucky with magazine articles or local library book selection.
Turbo Vision for a long time was for me like a golden standard. All the new TUI frameworks seemed like they were missing something.
Now I will get to see if that was just a nostalgia. Gonna use this in the next tool. Huge kudos to the authors <3
The TUI revivalism misses that for us back then, using TUIs was the only option in many cases, it wasn't because it was cool or something.
Indeed, except for GW-BASIC and MS-DOS, for me it was Borland all the way.
Turbo BASIC, Turbo Pascal, Turbo C++ for MS-DOS and Windows 3.x, Turbo Vision and OWL.
Got into VC+ on version 5, and MFC always felt so lame compared with Borland offerings.
To this day, they don't have anything that can match C++ Builder RAD capabilities, and even with the historic background, it has taken a few years for .NET to get the low level coding and AOT story straight, Delphi like.
We should give Go, C++ and Rust folks a few copies of Turbo Pascal 7 for MS-DOS, and Delphi current.