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."

That's just wierd

[KingDaveRa]

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 :)

Coincidence?

[Rob86TA]

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.

Sad, these are Borland's last ideas...

[bocsika]

My enterprise was based on Borland C++ in the last 10 years.

But this seems to be the last desperate ad before the collapse: the feature list contains no news at all - all of it should have been in Borland IDEs years ago.

Instead of chewing new buzzwords, the daily used tools should have been cleaned up first: Borland C++ Builder 6 behaves terribly even on medium size projects, (crashes, tons of bugs, etc.)
If Borland had a yearly update, I would be their greatest fun.
If Kylix would have been developed further, I would pay for it, because we need cross-platform Linux tools...
So many dead tools...

Nothing to see here, man, move away... to Qt, for example.
It is today's Borland. And shines.

But because it provides a steady release cycle, people will buy it, even if it is pricey.

Re:Coincidence?

[Anonymous Coward]

TFA states that Borland wants to sell off its IDE division. This is all about marketing. Give away the free edition to students, and they'll want to use at work. This is buzz for a buyout.

Personally, I'd buy anything from a man named "Mr. Swindell"! From the article: "Michael Swindell, [is] senior director of product management".

motivation?

[wmeyer]

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.

Wow -- such negativity

[NavySpy]

Wow -- what an impressive display of negativity!

Re:Hardware requirements?

[An ominous Cow art]

Some of the first code I wrote under DOS used Turbo C 1.0. Still have the manuals around here somewhere...

I still have a soft spot for the Brief editor (which Borland acquired at some point from UnderWare), too. Some of my most productive coding was done under Brief + dBrief...

New versus old. I stick with the proven old.

[dinther]

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.

A few kind suggestions:

[Ancient_Hacker]

Borland: I've been using your products on and off since Turbo Pascal 1.0. You've had some real winners in there, and a few dogs. For the last decade or so, more woofers than winners. Please take these suggestions in the spirit that they're given:

• I've seen hundreds of web sites, and yours is way down there around the bottom in terms of usability. I don't think it's changed much in the last ten years. Lots of fancy menus that reflect your corporate structure, not what we're interested in. Your download pages have been mostly unintelligible for almost a decade. Youre delphi download page is complete chaos. To download a trial copy you have to jump thru several hoops, fill out some useless marketing info forms, then separately login to get a key e-mailed to you. It's all too easy to get stuck going around in loops, again and again. Nothing seems to make sense or is integrated with anything else.
• Your pzatch methodology is the worst I've ever seen, and I've seen Sun's. Patches are supplied in some strange file format, not clearly labeled as being a patch to fix what in what. I've tried several times to patch Delphi 6 and finally gave up, it's just too difficult, somewhat harder than cross-compiling gcc for RISC on a Palm Pilot.
• Announcing you're "just about sold" is really unprofessional. It might make you feel a little better, but it doesnt reassure the customers. Half the time a company is sold is not for its products, but for its customers. There's a 50% chance we're not going to see great new Borland products, but instead coerced to be herded over to some other more-horrible toolset, like the resurrection of Symantec C.
• We had some really great times together, but yuou've had a far-away look in your eye for ove a decade now. How about we just call it quits?

My rant...

[Yuioup]

I started using Delphi a bit late in the game. A few years ago I chose Delphi 6 because it looked pretty decent and I liked the way it simplified the Win32 API in such a way that we could get to developing software without too much hassle. Delphi 7 came along which I passed over because I wanted to wait for Delphi 8 and jump on the .NET bandwagon. When Delphi 8 came out I bought it...

... which was the biggest mistake I ever made. Delphi 8 was a such a POS I was shocked that people actually released software that bad. Like they say in Southpark, "You see, I learned a lesson today..." and boy did I learn it good.

Ever since then Borland has been spiralling downwards into oblivion. Their best engineers walked out causing them to lag behind never being able to catch up again. Delphi 2005 was a POS and Delphi 2006 needed a couple patches before it actually worked. I never even bothered to upgrade and no I haven't tried the demos and no I don't give a shit.

I regulary check out the borland.public.delphi.non-technical [google.nl] to see what's going on in Delphiland. Half the comments are from .NET haters who constantly preach about how they don't use dot garbage and claim that native code is the best. My reply to those people is that if you don't understand the advantages of .NET over native code then you have no business writing software.

The other half of the comments are from the Delphi evangelists clinging on to the vain hope that Delphi will some day come back to its glory days and be the top IDE once more. All I can say to them is... can you feel the water around your ankles yet?

The only chance that Delphi has is pure and unconditional open source. I've suggested open sourcing Delphi several times but always my suggestions have fallen on deaf ears. I get short-sighted replies such as "and how can Borland earn their money"? and "oooh.. I hope not!". Too bad because it's been proven time and again that money can be made with Open Source and Borland is precisely at the right time at the right place to pull it off. Oh well, I guess they're going to miss the boat ... again.

END OF RANT

Re:What a gigantic fuck-up

[NMerriam]

The think I most fondly remember about Borladn was their no-nonsense user license. Instead of 20 pages of legalspeak, they had two or three paragraphs that said "Don't copy this, don't give it to your friends. you know you want to be nice, but we'd like to stay in business."

It was very human and gave a good first impression.

Borland's antique software available

[whitefox]

For those nostalgic types, Borland released "antique" versions of their software years ago: http://bdn.borland.com/museum/antiquesoftware/ [borland.com]. The list includes

• Turbo Pascal v1.0
• Turbo Pascal v3.02
• Turbo Pascal v5.5
• Turbo C version 2.01
• Turbo C++ version 1.01

FWIW, I was a college freshman and my first programming class was "Programming Concepts Using Pascal". Rather than use the university's mini-computer (horrible edit and compile environment), I wanted something I could use on a PC. Other Pascal compilers at that time were prohibitively priced for a student at hundreds/thousands of dollars. A friend pointed me to Turbo Pascal and I bought my own copy at Egghead for under $90. My very first software purchase by the way. I was a loyal fan following the product line from TP3->TP4->TC1->TC2->TP5->TC++1->BC++2->BC++4->BC5+ +.

With every iteration, they got a little more expensive even for loyal customers. Then they brought out the "Professional" versions and wanted more money - so I stopped.

How does this relate? TP3 let me do everything and anything I wanted (no-nonsense license) at an expensive (for me) but reasonable price. For the hobbyist or beginner, they will get frustated very quickly with the limitations imposed by the free editions but balk at paying $500 for a professional license. Offer them the professional level software with a no-nonsense license for $99 and Borland may see things turn around.

Re:This is only to bring up their stock price!

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the deal. Borland dev tool's have been becoming 'has been' for a while, despite generally superior quality, due to years of management fubar's - beginning with Inprise. Borland management's focus is now "ALM" tools, which have been siphoning profits from products like Delphi for at least a couple of years.

The dev tools division has been up for sale for a while - six months or so. During that time, 'DevCo' has been operating somewhat independently from Borland and has produced a couple of major service packs for Delphi and has been hiring talent. And now has come up with these Turbo tools.

Most veteran Borland dev tool customers are excited and optimistic about DevCo. 'Turbo' type tools have been something long requested. Updating the VCL and providing a D64 compiler seem to be more than a pipe dream now.

DevCo had announced that they had a buyer *before* the Turbo tools were announced. According to DevCo staff, an announcement about the buyer is imminent.

Borland can cater to the ether-land of *ALM*, DevCo will (hopefully) again give attention to Borland's traditional customers who just want kick-ass dev tools.

More info at the borland.public.delphi.non-technical.

Offering $1m/year salaries

[alexhmit01]

Microsoft started offering top people $1m/year salaries to snag them. While this seems like the market working, it's not quite real when Microsoft can use its massive cash reserves to cripple a company. Basically, if Microsoft can offer 20 key people $1m/year over market salaries, then the competition is either bled for $20m/year, which can destroy smaller competition, and hasn't cost Microsoft a dollar, or they spend $20m to put a competitor out of business by stealing key people and use their cash to establish a monopoly position.

This is blatantly anti-trust in the case of a monopolist, and was a lawsuit that I believe Microsoft settled.

Borland made some boneheaded management maneuvers, but this was after Microsoft crippled the company, and Borland made a desperate effort to recover.

Alex