1. If you've ever heard of TurboVision, this UI is similar to it. But actual TurboVision as it was later to be found in Borland programs, and as even can be found in clones today, did not have this look and feel, which would have seemed a little clunky for a TUI by the end of the 1980s.
1. Notice that F1 is already help, but the other function keys do not follow the CUA pattern that was only actually formalized that same year.
1. Notice the differently coloured letters for the shortcut keys for menu entries, something that has largely vanished nowadays.
1. Notice how wasteful of 80×25 area some of the windows are. It was not long before everyone had shrunk the application menu down to 1 row. Conversely, though, look how colour is used to demarcate function key names, rather than using square brackets.
1. Scroll Lock is actually a major part of the user interface. A number of MC/PC/DR-DOS programs at the time gave a use to Scroll Lock. In Turbo BASIC, it switched (as it says in the screen shot) into and out of a mode where the arrow keys moved/resized things.
Miss those days. When I got a 386 and could use the turbo debugger to hack games. Pretty sweet. Just run the code; interrupt it near where it was asking for a word or number or clicking a symbol, then tweak a flag and let the game continue.
So often the final fix was to nop out an instruction that set a flag and just let it fall through.
Then there was the DSI team in Vancouver who encrypted their boot code...
Like a lot of 90s kids my first language was BASIC via QBasic. After feeling like I had outgrown that I went looking for a "real" language to learn and landed on C++. The cost of Borland Turbo C++ 4.5 for a young kid, and my parents not being into computers so not keen on funding me, led me to ask for alternatives on IRC. I was told about [GNU/]Linux coming with a C/C++ compiler for free! I ordered a Red Hat CDROM from cheap*bytes and never looked back.
Had Borland not been so expensive or had the stranger on IRC known or told me GCC existed for DOS/Windows who knows where my career would be today.
In a weird way though I never used it, hearing about Borland Turbo anything still makes me happy because it reminds me of something I thought was unobtainium.
>my parents not being into computers so not keen on funding me
I feel this. I recall distinctly back in the mid '80s my mom, talking about my intense interest in computers: "It's great to have a hobby, but at some point you're going to need to figure out what you want to do for a real job."
I feel so incredibly fortunate that I grew up and had a hobby in what turned into a lucrative career, and that my parents supported me as best they could.
Tandy CoCo 2. Followed by a 386 20Mhz where I graduated from Basic to Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++
Once Borland started its eventual decline, this was a really awesome way to do a lot of those same Borland-style things in Linux. Allegro in particular was great.
I still miss Turbo Pascal (and later Delphi) ... not so much the language, but the speed of feedback was unparalleled.
OMG cheapbytes. I also ordered a RedHat CD-ROM from cheapbytes. I used it to install Linux onto my roommate's laptop at Santa Clara - without his knowledge or approval in advance. Whoops!
The funny thing is that Borland initially had the opposite problem, Turbo Pascal was so cheap that businesses thought it couldn't be serious compared to other company offerings. Borland raising their prices was almost a marketing move.
I really wish I'd gotten Borland C++ for my Amiga, but it was $350 in 1990-91. Still years before free software would be usable at home and PCs were quite relatively expensive compared to now (I was blown away when I calculated the modern price equivalent of my A3000 - over $10,000).
very similar childhood. my old man was a fortran dev in the 80s and so i had access to a lot of the borland tools thru his work. what a time to be a curious mind, i miss those days very much.
The only reason we had a computer was my dad was a machinist/metal fabricator and was convinced by business partners that he had to stop using his graph paper and scientific calculator and NEEDED AutoCAD. We had the tablet, puck, everything. He sat down to use it once and went straight back to graph paper.
But this was a great boon to me because it gave me a highly spec'd 486DX in the early 90s.
I hung out on #C from 92-96 quite a bit. The most shocking part of your story was that people didn't recommend an ftp site where you could get anything you wanted for free.
Oh they definitely did give me FTP sites, I just didn't want to ramble too much. I think at that time I had a USRobotics 33.6 sportster and a shared line with the rest of the house. Downloading large-ish files even overnight was a no go. My mom was a school teacher and the thought of her missing a call from the district about a snow day or other calamity would have been a disaster!
Imagine going back in time to late-80s/early-90s, and vividly describing all the tools we have now to folks back then -- coding agents, loops, autonomous multi-hour agentic workflows, automated testing, and PRs, and whatnot. Wonder what their reaction would be.
I sometimes look at my pre-2024 workflows and feel like I'm looking at a caveman's toolchain. Absolutely bonkers as to how quickly we humans adapt to things.
Also, neat bit of trivia: Borland was originally named MIT ("Market In Time"). The OG MIT in Cambridge, MA, sent a trademark letter and they then changed their name to Borland, which was supposedly a client of theirs.
Imagine going back in time to late-80s/early-90s, and vividly describing all the tools we have now to folks back then -- coding agents, loops, autonomous multi-hour agentic workflows, automated testing, and PRs, and whatnot. Wonder what their reaction would be.
I sometimes look at my pre-2024 workflows and feel like I'm looking at a caveman's toolchain. Absolutely bonkers as to how quickly we humans adapt to things.
It’s complicated. Especially because we had a huge regression in programming from roughly the mid-90s until recently.
In the early 90s I used Turbo Pascal as a kid. It was an editor with an awesome built-in debugger, profiler, online help, super fast compiler. This all culminated into Delphi, which had all that and offered drag-and-drop UI building.
Programming regressed a lot after the demise of Borland IDEs. Especially on Linux/Unix the tooling was very primitive in comparison.
In a very weird way, LLMs brought back a bit of these old environments in the sense that you can use one interface for programming, debugging and profiling. It just does more of the boring work for us (cross-referencing code, writing profiling cases, etc.
Other than that, LLMs, etc. would be so foreign for someone from the 80s that their minds would be blown and it would look like alien technology.
They would probably say, "That's nice dear, but we just got rid of the timesharing service and we're not going back to that just because you call it The Cloud. We just got perrsonal computers and we're not going back."
I absolutely loved the help docs that came in Borland products. To this day they are my gold standard of documentation and nothing has ever meet them. I learned so much simply navigating their docs. The best part was that they had actual examples that you could see it working, copy/paste modify. To an extent, a taste of open source.
I graduated quickly from Borland Turbo Basic to Turbo Pascal, and really wish I'd bothered to hold onto all those old floppies. I do still have a Visual Studio / VSCode color settings file that matches the old look -- I used those colors for a good long time, longer than it took me to stop coding in all caps.
A friend and I built our first "game" in Turbo Basic. It was fairly capable and being able to make an EXE out of a basic program felt like magic when GW-Basic and QBasic were the only other basic's we were had ever used on a PC. Several years later VB for DOS was also pretty impressive with a text-mode form designer.
I was stuck on QBASIC early 90’s. Read all the C++ and assembler books in the library. Buying a compiler was extraordinary expensive (around 4000 dollars in today’s money). So, was left to build myself an assembler and super simple compiler. Good times.
I own it, it was a great introduction to compiled BASIC, on MS-DOS 3.3!
Thus I don't have the same affinity to QBasic, as others do, I had already enjoyed compiled BASIC and systems programming in BASIC by the time MS-DOS 5 came out.
Great memories, and eventually made the jump into Turbo Pascal.
I've been using Turbo Pascal and Turbo Assembler on real vintage hardware in my attempt to do the Roguelike Tutorial. I'm still getting to the point of finishing part 1 because I decided to go hard mode and use the graphics coprocessor to draw 16x16 tiles instead of text mode.
I still tinker with it, now and again. Though I admit I get distracted and mostly run stuff under BBC BASIC (with it's integrated assembly support), and then switch to replaying Zork!
I really miss the old Borland Turbo [*] days, both in terms of the languages and the IDEs. (Turbo BASIC wasn't my first BASIC, but Turbo Pascal and Turbo C were absolutely formative for me.)
VS Code had a little bit of that feel, but it's grown so much and added so many features that it's lost it. And the closest thing I've found to the feeling of writing C in the 90s was Arduino sketches a decade ago.
Borland later killed off the product, Bob took it back from them, and kept releasing new versions of PowerBASIC until he passed away. From what I understand he kept his source repository encrypted and didn't share the details of how to access with anyone, not even his wife, so the product died with him.
There was some car show episode with an actual barn-find unmolested 70s Dodge Charger with matching numbers. The widow had no idea what it was worth so the guy showed her the assessment and paid her the fair market value.
I don't miss the memory models - on Borland or any other environment.
But oh, the license. "Use it like a book". That is, any number of people can use it, but only one at a time. And it was like two paragraphs, and written for humans, not lawyers. Amazing.
A bit of amusing trivia: When Turbo Basic was returned to Bob Zale, he had to choose a new name for the product and made a list of likely candidates to choose from. One of the leading names was rejected once it occurred to Bob how it might be interpreted. It was "Master Basic".
VB5 Pro was one of the best IDE's I have ever used. You could literally write code as you debugged. This sounds dangerous and is, but It helped me understand how programming actually worked. F1 context help was a great idea and super helpful - MS ruined it with MS Developer CD and it was super slow. I decided to get into programming because in Junior college we built a pizza ordering client server and had two IDEs opened in debug mode and you could step through it from client to server. I bought a $2000 computer and VB5 Pro for $55 at a computer show and got into VB Access programming job. Borland was kinda fading away out when I started programming and MS products were taking over the campus.
Esp. the lightspeed compile times, and that you could create a redist exe-file to copy your "highly sophisticated games" to your friends and show them, how cool it is :-))
They used Turbo Basic in Dbase 3 & 4 as well. It was so useful that Foxpro built a migration tool to port your dbase databases and code to Foxpro. Some of the first floppies I carried with me everywhere were my Dbase databases and basic programs.
I've used dBase (DOS) III+ and IV extensively, but never saw any BASIC there. Did I miss something?
I eventually replaced dBase with Turbo Pascal plus a library named Topaz that offered most of the relevant functionality (including reading/writing DBF files).
There's a lot more that can be said about this:
1. If you've ever heard of TurboVision, this UI is similar to it. But actual TurboVision as it was later to be found in Borland programs, and as even can be found in clones today, did not have this look and feel, which would have seemed a little clunky for a TUI by the end of the 1980s.
1. Notice that F1 is already help, but the other function keys do not follow the CUA pattern that was only actually formalized that same year.
1. Notice the differently coloured letters for the shortcut keys for menu entries, something that has largely vanished nowadays.
1. Notice how wasteful of 80×25 area some of the windows are. It was not long before everyone had shrunk the application menu down to 1 row. Conversely, though, look how colour is used to demarcate function key names, rather than using square brackets.
1. Scroll Lock is actually a major part of the user interface. A number of MC/PC/DR-DOS programs at the time gave a use to Scroll Lock. In Turbo BASIC, it switched (as it says in the screen shot) into and out of a mode where the arrow keys moved/resized things.
Note that when Turbo BASIC came out, Turbo Pascal 6 was still a few years away.
This interface is magical when comparing with Turbo Pascal 3.3 and 4.0.
I don't recall any longer correctly, but I think Turbo Basic even supported dual monitor debugging sessions.
I know their Turbo C 2 tools did.
Miss those days. When I got a 386 and could use the turbo debugger to hack games. Pretty sweet. Just run the code; interrupt it near where it was asking for a word or number or clicking a symbol, then tweak a flag and let the game continue.
So often the final fix was to nop out an instruction that set a flag and just let it fall through.
Then there was the DSI team in Vancouver who encrypted their boot code...
Like a lot of 90s kids my first language was BASIC via QBasic. After feeling like I had outgrown that I went looking for a "real" language to learn and landed on C++. The cost of Borland Turbo C++ 4.5 for a young kid, and my parents not being into computers so not keen on funding me, led me to ask for alternatives on IRC. I was told about [GNU/]Linux coming with a C/C++ compiler for free! I ordered a Red Hat CDROM from cheap*bytes and never looked back.
Had Borland not been so expensive or had the stranger on IRC known or told me GCC existed for DOS/Windows who knows where my career would be today.
In a weird way though I never used it, hearing about Borland Turbo anything still makes me happy because it reminds me of something I thought was unobtainium.
>my parents not being into computers so not keen on funding me
I feel this. I recall distinctly back in the mid '80s my mom, talking about my intense interest in computers: "It's great to have a hobby, but at some point you're going to need to figure out what you want to do for a real job."
And here I've turned my hobby into a living.
I feel so incredibly fortunate that I grew up and had a hobby in what turned into a lucrative career, and that my parents supported me as best they could.
Tandy CoCo 2. Followed by a 386 20Mhz where I graduated from Basic to Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++
My Dad uses to say "Stop playing around on that ^%$# computer and do some work!".
Well, I got the last laugh on that one.
> or told me GCC existed for DOS/Windows
DJGPP rhide and allegro that was my gateway drug!
Once Borland started its eventual decline, this was a really awesome way to do a lot of those same Borland-style things in Linux. Allegro in particular was great.
I still miss Turbo Pascal (and later Delphi) ... not so much the language, but the speed of feedback was unparalleled.
OMG cheapbytes. I also ordered a RedHat CD-ROM from cheapbytes. I used it to install Linux onto my roommate's laptop at Santa Clara - without his knowledge or approval in advance. Whoops!
Hilarious that we were both commandeering computers of those we lived with via a $2.99 copy of Red Hat. Good times!
The funny thing is that Borland initially had the opposite problem, Turbo Pascal was so cheap that businesses thought it couldn't be serious compared to other company offerings. Borland raising their prices was almost a marketing move.
I really wish I'd gotten Borland C++ for my Amiga, but it was $350 in 1990-91. Still years before free software would be usable at home and PCs were quite relatively expensive compared to now (I was blown away when I calculated the modern price equivalent of my A3000 - over $10,000).
This is almost identical to my journey. Except it was the fact that I (my parents) could not afford a copy of Visual C++.
very similar childhood. my old man was a fortran dev in the 80s and so i had access to a lot of the borland tools thru his work. what a time to be a curious mind, i miss those days very much.
The only reason we had a computer was my dad was a machinist/metal fabricator and was convinced by business partners that he had to stop using his graph paper and scientific calculator and NEEDED AutoCAD. We had the tablet, puck, everything. He sat down to use it once and went straight back to graph paper.
But this was a great boon to me because it gave me a highly spec'd 486DX in the early 90s.
1 reply →
I hung out on #C from 92-96 quite a bit. The most shocking part of your story was that people didn't recommend an ftp site where you could get anything you wanted for free.
Oh they definitely did give me FTP sites, I just didn't want to ramble too much. I think at that time I had a USRobotics 33.6 sportster and a shared line with the rest of the house. Downloading large-ish files even overnight was a no go. My mom was a school teacher and the thought of her missing a call from the district about a snow day or other calamity would have been a disaster!
Imagine going back in time to late-80s/early-90s, and vividly describing all the tools we have now to folks back then -- coding agents, loops, autonomous multi-hour agentic workflows, automated testing, and PRs, and whatnot. Wonder what their reaction would be.
I sometimes look at my pre-2024 workflows and feel like I'm looking at a caveman's toolchain. Absolutely bonkers as to how quickly we humans adapt to things.
Also, neat bit of trivia: Borland was originally named MIT ("Market In Time"). The OG MIT in Cambridge, MA, sent a trademark letter and they then changed their name to Borland, which was supposedly a client of theirs.
Imagine going back in time to late-80s/early-90s, and vividly describing all the tools we have now to folks back then -- coding agents, loops, autonomous multi-hour agentic workflows, automated testing, and PRs, and whatnot. Wonder what their reaction would be. I sometimes look at my pre-2024 workflows and feel like I'm looking at a caveman's toolchain. Absolutely bonkers as to how quickly we humans adapt to things.
It’s complicated. Especially because we had a huge regression in programming from roughly the mid-90s until recently.
In the early 90s I used Turbo Pascal as a kid. It was an editor with an awesome built-in debugger, profiler, online help, super fast compiler. This all culminated into Delphi, which had all that and offered drag-and-drop UI building.
Programming regressed a lot after the demise of Borland IDEs. Especially on Linux/Unix the tooling was very primitive in comparison.
In a very weird way, LLMs brought back a bit of these old environments in the sense that you can use one interface for programming, debugging and profiling. It just does more of the boring work for us (cross-referencing code, writing profiling cases, etc.
Other than that, LLMs, etc. would be so foreign for someone from the 80s that their minds would be blown and it would look like alien technology.
They would probably say, "That's nice dear, but we just got rid of the timesharing service and we're not going back to that just because you call it The Cloud. We just got perrsonal computers and we're not going back."
I'd like to go back to the 80s/90s and never come back, if I can get a programming job. Damn I would like to ride the wave that I totally missed.
If you tell them about javascript, they'll ask what Earth you're from in the Multiverse of Madness.
I absolutely loved the help docs that came in Borland products. To this day they are my gold standard of documentation and nothing has ever meet them. I learned so much simply navigating their docs. The best part was that they had actual examples that you could see it working, copy/paste modify. To an extent, a taste of open source.
Just curious: Are you thinking of the Turbo Help (THELP) TSR or the help built-in to the IDE?
I graduated quickly from Borland Turbo Basic to Turbo Pascal, and really wish I'd bothered to hold onto all those old floppies. I do still have a Visual Studio / VSCode color settings file that matches the old look -- I used those colors for a good long time, longer than it took me to stop coding in all caps.
A friend and I built our first "game" in Turbo Basic. It was fairly capable and being able to make an EXE out of a basic program felt like magic when GW-Basic and QBasic were the only other basic's we were had ever used on a PC. Several years later VB for DOS was also pretty impressive with a text-mode form designer.
I was stuck on QBASIC early 90’s. Read all the C++ and assembler books in the library. Buying a compiler was extraordinary expensive (around 4000 dollars in today’s money). So, was left to build myself an assembler and super simple compiler. Good times.
I own it, it was a great introduction to compiled BASIC, on MS-DOS 3.3!
Thus I don't have the same affinity to QBasic, as others do, I had already enjoyed compiled BASIC and systems programming in BASIC by the time MS-DOS 5 came out.
Great memories, and eventually made the jump into Turbo Pascal.
You can try Turbo Pascal (and a few other old coding environment) online here: https://aryx.github.io/ocaml-elm-playground/apps/#programmin...
I've been using Turbo Pascal and Turbo Assembler on real vintage hardware in my attempt to do the Roguelike Tutorial. I'm still getting to the point of finishing part 1 because I decided to go hard mode and use the graphics coprocessor to draw 16x16 tiles instead of text mode.
I wrote a CP/M emulator which you can find here:
https://github.com/skx/cpmulator
There's also a repository of curated/vintage programs, including Turbo Pascal here:
https://github.com/skx/cpm-dist
I still tinker with it, now and again. Though I admit I get distracted and mostly run stuff under BBC BASIC (with it's integrated assembly support), and then switch to replaying Zork!
I found 1.0, a German release, and German Turbo Toolbox here:
https://archive.org/details/000376-BorlandTurboBasic10>
https://archive.org/details/BorlandTurboBasic1.0German
https://archive.org/details/turbotoolbox
In the time I was willing to spend, I did not see a 1.1 release.
I love Borland product design, I always fall back to using their design language in my personal use tools[1].
1. You can see them in my recent submissions. Don't want to shill.
I really miss the old Borland Turbo [*] days, both in terms of the languages and the IDEs. (Turbo BASIC wasn't my first BASIC, but Turbo Pascal and Turbo C were absolutely formative for me.)
VS Code had a little bit of that feel, but it's grown so much and added so many features that it's lost it. And the closest thing I've found to the feeling of writing C in the 90s was Arduino sketches a decade ago.
Borland later killed off the product, Bob took it back from them, and kept releasing new versions of PowerBASIC until he passed away. From what I understand he kept his source repository encrypted and didn't share the details of how to access with anyone, not even his wife, so the product died with him.
There was some car show episode with an actual barn-find unmolested 70s Dodge Charger with matching numbers. The widow had no idea what it was worth so the guy showed her the assessment and paid her the fair market value.
Borland Turbo C was a delight! They don't make 'em like that anymore.
Cheers to those memory models :-)
I don't miss the memory models - on Borland or any other environment.
But oh, the license. "Use it like a book". That is, any number of people can use it, but only one at a time. And it was like two paragraphs, and written for humans, not lawyers. Amazing.
A bit of amusing trivia: When Turbo Basic was returned to Bob Zale, he had to choose a new name for the product and made a list of likely candidates to choose from. One of the leading names was rejected once it occurred to Bob how it might be interpreted. It was "Master Basic".
VB5 Pro was one of the best IDE's I have ever used. You could literally write code as you debugged. This sounds dangerous and is, but It helped me understand how programming actually worked. F1 context help was a great idea and super helpful - MS ruined it with MS Developer CD and it was super slow. I decided to get into programming because in Junior college we built a pizza ordering client server and had two IDEs opened in debug mode and you could step through it from client to server. I bought a $2000 computer and VB5 Pro for $55 at a computer show and got into VB Access programming job. Borland was kinda fading away out when I started programming and MS products were taking over the campus.
OT:
Turbo Pascal was just genius, really!
Esp. the lightspeed compile times, and that you could create a redist exe-file to copy your "highly sophisticated games" to your friends and show them, how cool it is :-))
Good ol times!
That was true even into the Delphi days. Around 2007 I was able to compile about 400,000 lines of code in 2-3 seconds on my desktop.
For sure! Delphi is the successor of Turbo Pascal, it came with the same features built-in! :-)
Are there any good, more modern alternatives to Turbo Basic for people who want to get back into programming in BASIC?
Depends. The two that I'm familiar with are probably FreeBASIC and QB64.
QB64 is pretty popular as a sort of QBASIC-dialect with additional features like OpenGL, multimedia support, etc.
FreeBasic is decent as well but its focus is more on being a compiler whereas QB64 aims to be more batteries-included with its builtin IDE.
https://github.com/QB64-Phoenix-Edition/QB64pe
https://github.com/freebasic/fbc
ThoreauBASIC has just come up on Hacker News:
* https://robhagemans.github.io/pcbasic/
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I never knew this existed until today. 1980s me would have loved this.
The coloured shortcut letters in the menus are such a nice touch. Modern apps hide keyboard shortcuts so well that most people never learn them.
They used Turbo Basic in Dbase 3 & 4 as well. It was so useful that Foxpro built a migration tool to port your dbase databases and code to Foxpro. Some of the first floppies I carried with me everywhere were my Dbase databases and basic programs.
I've used dBase (DOS) III+ and IV extensively, but never saw any BASIC there. Did I miss something?
I eventually replaced dBase with Turbo Pascal plus a library named Topaz that offered most of the relevant functionality (including reading/writing DBF files).