Borland Announces the Return of the Turbo Products, with Video

Leonel writes "Borland Software's Developer Tools Group just announced the return of the Turbo line of products. With free and cheap versions, it's aimed at students, hobbyist developers, occupational developers and individual programming professionals. More information is available at the the Turbo Explorer website, including a video of the Adventures of TurboMan."

What age group?

[neonprimetime (528653)]

it's aimed at students, hobbyist developers, occupational developers and individual programming professionals. More information is available at the the Turbo Explorer website, including a video of the Adventures of TurboMan.

The adventures of TurboMan? Just to confirm, we are talking about college students, not elementary school, right?

Re:What age group?

[0racle (667029)]

we are talking about college students, not elementary school, right?

What's the difference?

Hardware requirements?

[Rupert_Giles (992036)]

Do these still need two 5.25" floppy drives to run? I'm not sure I remember where mine are.

That's just wierd

[KingDaveRa (620784)]

Last night, I was digging around on the Borland site to see if there was such a thing as this, and today they announce it. How's that for a co-incidence!

I'll certainly be interested to look at these though. Free things are ALWAYS good :)

Re:That's just wierd

[bwcarty (660606)]

Free things are ALWAYS good :)

Did you live in Troy [wikipedia.org] in a previous life?

Re:That's just wierd

[Rob T Firefly (844560)]

Last night, I was digging around on the Borland site to see if there was such a thing as this, and today they announce it. How's that for a co-incidence!

It's no coincidence. The web guy noticed your digging in the server logs, mumbled in dull surprise at the fact that anyone was still interested, and cut-and-pasted your activities in the logs a few hundred thousand times for a few giggles to break up the monotony.

This morning happened to be when the bosses glanced at the logs, and once they realized how "popular" this stuff seems to be, they knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that it's time for the return of Turbo.

Here we go again...

[by Anonymous Coward]

TurboProducts return!

With 80% more standards non-compliance.

TurboC

[WPIDalamar (122110)]

I learned to program on a dos version of TurboC ... To this day I still prefer the yellow on blue text :)

Re:TurboC

[RuneB (170521)]

You might want to try SETEDIT [sourceforge.net] or RHIDE [rhide.com]. SETEDIT is an editor and RHIDE is an IDE, both written using the Turbo Vision toolkit.

Coincidence?

[Rob86TA (955953)]

Interesting that the Borland tools are being released close to the end of the free year of MS's Express line (ending in Nov. I believe). Could Borland be preparing to take on the MS developer tool chain again?

Considering that Visual Studio is a highly evolved (I know, this is ALWAYS open for debate on /.) tool chain. It'll be fun to see if Borland can bring anything new and unique to compete with the VS Express Editions.

Re:Coincidence?

[nuzak (959558)]

> Interesting that the Borland tools are being released close to the end of the free year of MS's Express line (ending in Nov. I believe).

Microsoft lifted the end date back in April. It's being offered for free forever. Well, as long as forever goes with Microsoft (The VS2003 toolchain didn't take long to disappear).

Visual Studio Express is free forever

[ragingmime (636249)]

I thought that too, but then I double-checked Microsoft's FAQ [microsoft.com]: Effective April 19th, 2006, all Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions are free permanently. This pricing covers all Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions including Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual C++, Visual J#, and Visual Web Developer as well as all localized versions of Visual Studio Express.

We'll see if they ever update it, though.

But yeah, this sounds like Borland is trying to compete with MS tools. Good for them! I'm all for companies giving a hand to folks who want to learn their tools... especially if we get free stuff out of the deal. :)

The times they are a changin'

[realnowhereman (263389)]

At the time, Borland (or maybe Watcom) had the best C++ compilers. They also had a wonderfully designed library in the form of TurboVision for doing console applications with menus and windows. However, time has passed, GCC is a damned fine compiler and Qt is a superb UI framework (et al). If Borland wanted to join in this game they should have open sourced their compiler a long time ago. Too little, too late I'm afraid.

It's a shame really, Borland were my favourite company, then Philip Kahn left, they changed their name to Inprise and all their top developers went to Microsoft.

Turbo C++

[Almahtar (991773)]

Could be really nice having another commercial Windows C++ IDE around. At my workplace we really need an alternative to Visual Studio. In a codebase that's nearly 1,000,000 lines intellisense is insanely slow, completely inaccurate, and honestly just plain annoying. Visual studio randomly crashes, etc. We're in the process of switching to CMake so people can use Eclipse or whatever IDE they want, but Eclipse's CDT is still a bit too young for my tastes. Perhaps Borland's IDE will provide a welcome reprieve and nice debugging.

Why Switch To Borland's Turbo Line?

[Petersko (564140)]

I would imagine that Borland hopes to boost sales of its higher end lines by giving away the cheap ones and hooking the developers, but they'd better have some super-sweet bait on the end of the hook. There are tons of powerful IDE's, many free. Unless they bring something to the table that is lacking in other products, I can't see them reaching their business objectives.

People are beginning to expect the IDE to be free. Oracle knows this, so does Sun.

Best of luck to Borland. I have fond memories all the way back to Borland C++ 3.x for Windows, and Delphi - ESPECIALLY Delphi.

This is only to bring up their stock price!

[jhfry (829244)]

FTA:
"the company's Developer Tools Group, WHICH IS UP FOR SALE, is scheduled to announce single-language versions of the components of Borland Developer Studio..."

The "up for sale" bit tells me that what they are doing is trying to drive some good press, boost their stock price a bit, and negotiate a higher selling price.

Like most has-been corporations, they refuse to accept that they are obsolete and out of the running, so they would rather simply inflate their stock prices artifically so they can walk away with a nice chunk of change ans say, "see we didn't fail!" All I can say is, at least they didn't inflate theirs like SCO did!

What a gigantic fuck-up

[melted (227442)]

Borland was EXTREMELY popular back in the day. They could have OWNED the dev tools space completely. At some point they got too carried away with MBA-related activities, such as branding, enterprise fads du jour, etc and they lost their userbase and fucked up their products. I have used Delphi and C++ Builder extensively. 6-7 years back there was NO decent RAD alternative. The best thing about them was you could drop all the way to the bare metal at any time if you wanted to and you could have RAD capabilities if you needed to deliver stuff quickly.

I feel for Borland, but at this point I think they should fold up their tent and die. They're beyond any hope of recovery, thanks to retarded management and marketing.

Never mind that shit!!

[$RANDOMLUSER (804576)]

We want Brief (remember UnderWare?) back!
The best programmers editor evar! Globsub in a column-marked block? No problemo!
Open source it!

New versus old. I stick with the proven old.

[dinther (738910)]

I don't get it. Why does everyone want new tools all the time. Windows is still windows, A button is still a button and the communication protocols are supported accross the development platforms.

I have been working with Delphi since version 3 and still tackle new projects today with Delphi 6 (Don't want the newer and slower Visual Studio lookalike IDE).

Here at work I am cracking up lauging these days. Most of the dev team have moved to gadget-land using Visual Studio and C#. As a result they need to upgrade all the dev machines (Again) and find out that the resources sucked up by the bloatware .net platform leaves them with very little working power. There all stressed and tearing their hair out when a server spits blood because they can't see inside!

In the mean time our old and trusty properly hand coded applications keep scaling up on ever more powerful hardware showing there is many more years of use in the old and proven.

I believe I am more productive using Delphi today than a whole line up of fancy Microsoft fanboy developers because I have access to absolutely amazing free library source code build and refined by users over the years. A massive Delphi and Windows API knowledge base indexed by Google newsgroups, a solid grounded knowledge of my tools and libraries and last but not least a very supportive Delphi user base.

I hope this Turbo initiative will bring more developers to their senses and start coding again instead of playing with shiny black box Microsoft crap.

Turbo Bullshit

[fm6 (162816)]

No, they're not bringing back Turbo Pascal. They're just rebranding Delphi and Delphi-based products as "Turbo".

Hearken, ye, to a Borland survior. (I wrote a good chunk of the API documentation in Delphi, C++Builder, and Kylix.) Borland somehow has always been run by people who know jack about managing other people. They can't implement the most basic corporate policies, like making people work on the stuff they were actually assigned to work on. So they fall back on Stupid Executive Tricks that they picked up at some seminar somewhere. When I was there, management was in love with "lifecycle management" tools, and actually acquired two vendors of them, neither of which actually had a usable product. But most often, the SET consists of simple-minded rebranding. Usually, it's just pointless, like bringing back "Turbo". But sometimes, they really screw up, like when they renamed the company "Inprise".

Hate to say it, but Borland's pretty much irrelevent. Their last serious achievement was Kylix, which took too long to get out the door, and which targeted a market (Linux desktop developers) that turned out to be nonexistant. And that was 5 years ago! Since then, most of their key people have moved on, and their tools group has stagnated. The fact that management thinks they can sell it just shows how clueless they are.

Delphi is still my favorite development environment. Or rather it would be, if I could bear to use it. Which I can't — it's just too depressing.

Re:Delphi???

[Leonel (52396)]

Delphi ain't your father's Pascal. It's a modern, object-oriented interoperable language. The main advantage isn't the language itself, but the class library (VCL) and the form designer, which is the best tool around to build user interfaces (ask Skype), while still having the ability of having your code neatly encapsulated in classes separated from the presentation layer.

Anyway, Delphi is only half of the picture here. There's Turbo C++ and C# offerings along with the native Delphi and Delphi for .Net offerings. if that's your language of choice, you can use C++ with the VCL (or for plain WinAPI applications, if you feel inclined).

Basically, the explorer versions are advanced IDEs for these languages, free of change, allowing commercial development. There's your motivation.

Turbo Pascal was disruptive

[Migraineman (632203)]

Pascal was/is a great learning language. It's not too difficult to comprehend, but it's strong enough that you don't immediately exceed it's capabilities once you "get it."

Turbo Pascal was a great because a) it was inexpensive compared to everyone else; and b) it compiled soooo much faster than everyone else. The development environment concept was pretty innovative too, and eliminated much of the command line funkiness. Funny, I didn't Turbo Pascal in the press release - Delphi, C++, C#. I guess you could call Delphi "object Pascal" if you wanted to.

However, this press release stinks of a marketing cash-grab where they try to make a quick buck by squeezing the legacy heritage of a well-known trademark. I just don't see that they're adding any value to the proposition. Some marketroid probably did the math based on "no new development NRE" and was brimming at the huge potential margins on such a re-release (i.e. Margin := (1 - Expenses / Revenue); ). There's competition now, and most machines owned by hobby-programmers and students will cruise through the compilation process fast enough that the "turbo" brand doesn't offer a compelling solution like it used to. There are OSS solutions available, so the "less expensive" compulsion is gone as well. Back in the day (man, y'all are making me feel old ...) the alternative was the Microsoft compiler that was dog slow and required a manual linking step ... from the command line ... both ways.

Tell Blaise that I still have fond memories ... now get the hell off my lawn!

motivation?

[wmeyer (17620)]

Your motivation? How is productivity as a motivation?

Delphi has been my tool of choice for the last 11 years. It remains the
most productive development tool I have used.

Agile processes? Well, the build on a Delphi project is so quick, you
don't have time to fill your coffee cup, much less drink it. So build/test
cycles are fast.

The language is powerful, and a great foundation for those who choose to
move to C#. The learning curve on C#, coming from Delphi, is pretty shallow.

But please, stay with your g++, and those glacially slow builds. I don't
need more competition.

Turbo C

[doti (966971)]

Me too.
I still keep a copy of Borland C++ 3.1 (the last DOS version).

It was an awesome IDE, very productive.
Good old days.

(Not that today is less bright, Vim/gcc/gdb has it all, too.)

Re:download

[blirp (147278)]

Are these available for download?

Well, there's that
    27 days, 9 hrs, 40 mins, 30 secs
    until the Turbo(s) are here!
timer there [turboexplorer.com]. Might explain the missing download links. :*)