Borland Announces the Return of the Turbo Products, with Video 286
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? (Score:4, Insightful)
The adventures of TurboMan? Just to confirm, we are talking about college students, not elementary school, right?
Re:What age group? (Score:2)
Considering that the TurboMan ad campaign [borland.com] was back in 1988, I would say this is an attempt to appeal to people now in their 30s minimum.
Re:What age group? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What age group? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What age group? (Score:2)
Hardware requirements? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hardware requirements? (Score:2)
And at the time we made backups of all the disks and worked from those. Ugh.
Re:Hardware requirements? (Score:3, Interesting)
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...
Re:Hardware requirements? (Score:2)
That's just wierd (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll certainly be interested to look at these though. Free things are ALWAYS good
Re:That's just wierd (Score:5, Funny)
Did you live in Troy [wikipedia.org] in a previous life?
Re:That's just wierd (Score:2)
That just goes to show that often it's possible to turn a disadvantage into an advantage.
Re:That's just wierd (Score:3, Funny)
Re:That's just wierd (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:That's just wierd (Score:2)
Here we go again... (Score:5, Funny)
With 80% more standards non-compliance.
TurboC (Score:5, Funny)
Re:TurboC (Score:2)
Re:TurboC (Score:2, Insightful)
It was nice that you could write a simple single file C application, and compile and run it without any concern over projects and solutions or makefiles. Also nice that it gave a lot of screen real estate to the editor.
Re:TurboC (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't forget the silly keys (Score:2)
Re:TurboC (Score:5, Informative)
Coincidence? (Score:5, Interesting)
Considering that Visual Studio is a highly evolved (I know, this is ALWAYS open for debate on
Re:Coincidence? (Score:5, Informative)
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).
Re:Coincidence? (Score:2)
Heck, their network drivers didn't take long to disappear after they quit selling their networking products. I had lost my CD for their wireless card and it's not available. This is a significant departure in comparison with many major brand hardware makers where drivers are kept up seemingly indefinitely. For example, old modem drivers are still available on US Robotic's site (or whoever bought them up). Drivers for my eight year old Compaq workatations
Re:Coincidence? (Score:2)
I know this is offtopic, but what does this mean? I downloaded most of the VS express editions. Will they stop working? or will they just not let anyone download them after november?
Re:Coincidence? (Score:2)
Currently, though, there's no cutoff date listed.
Re:Coincidence? (Score:2)
I sure hope they can compete with Microsoft. As it stands now, they have (arguably) the most visible OS, developer platform, database, and office tools in the business arena. The way everything stacks up, and the way that businesses like a simple direct solution, Microsoft basically has to c
Visual Studio Express is free forever (Score:5, Insightful)
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' (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:The times they are a changin' (Score:2)
I'm afraid I have never forgiven Borland for their circa 1992 UI bug (or would that be a deliberate feature in some jokester's eyes?) in which a certain keystroke sequence used to build one's app in the MS IDE caused the Borland IDE to crash without saving the files on which one was working. The deal was that the MS IDE accepted a keystroke sequence of {altdown}{key1}{key2}{altup}, whereas Borland required {altdown}{key1}{altup}{key2}.
Offering $1m/year salaries (Score:3, Interesting)
Turbo C++ (Score:3, Insightful)
Intellisense (Score:2, Informative)
Although I use it with not-that-complex projects, in my case the difference between speed is evident: it takes forever for the list of relevant options to show up in Borland's IDEs, while in VS the speed at which it shows up and can be used is the same, even after the project grows in complexity.
Re:Turbo C++ (Score:2)
Twenty years of using borland products (Score:2)
Why Switch To Borland's Turbo Line? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Why Switch To Borland's Turbo Line? (Score:2, Insightful)
Age and history, don't forget, most of the managers now were code monkeys back then and a hell of a lot of them used borland.
Re:Why Switch To Borland's Turbo Line? (Score:2)
Shame really, as Delphi rocked.
Sounds like Coke... (Score:2)
Re:Sounds like Coke... (Score:2)
download (Score:2)
I can't see any working download link on the site.
Or is it a firewall or browser compatibility problem?
Re:download (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Countdown (Score:2, Funny)
Re:download (Score:2)
Look on the right hand side of the page, near the top. There is a countdown showing that in 27 days, 15 hrs, 41 mins, 45 secs (and counting) these will become available. Your browser could be hiding that part.
For now, it's a pre-announcement of a product you can't have yet.
Cheers
Sad, these are Borland's last ideas... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Great stuff! But... (Score:3, Informative)
These days Borland Developer Studio gives me time to make some coffee.
BUT .Net 1.1? Seriously? We've been at 2.0 for some time now, right? Did Borland just miss that announcement?
.NET 1.1 (Score:2)
Others have pointed out that a big point of this is likely to attract buyers for their IDE group which is up for sale. As I recall, the "released" version of Mono is an open source, cross-platform .NET 1.1 (+some later features) implementation that Novell has invested heavily in; a set of commercial development tools that target .NET 1.1 might be particularly interesting to Novell.
This is only to bring up their stock price! (Score:5, Insightful)
"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!
Re:This is only to bring up their stock price! (Score:2, Interesting)
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 ser
Filter them out. (Score:2)
The Microsoft People have Visual Studio. The Java people have Eclipse/NetBeans. The OSS people have gcc, perl and whatnot.
Nobody needs Borland anymore.
Re:Filter them out. (Score:2, Funny)
Yawn... (Score:3, Insightful)
What a gigantic fuck-up (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:What a gigantic fuck-up (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What a gigantic fuck-up (Score:3, Interesting)
It was very human and gave a good first impression.
Re:What a gigantic fuck-up (Score:2)
Well you were lucky, i ad to walk 15 miles to work int snow, then use Turbo Pascal 3, and compile everyting into a 64k COM file, and if it didnt run, my bos used to beat me with a stick.
Re:What a gigantic fuck-up (Score:2)
It's nice to know at least one of my former employees is reading Slashdot.
Wow -- such negativity (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Wow -- such negativity (Score:2)
What did you expect?
Most here would hate to be distracted from their beloved gcc.
Why use this over Microsoft Visual Studio Express? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why use this over Microsoft Visual Studio Expre (Score:2)
Well, Borland's giving their own "Explorer" versions for free, too; I suspect some people will experiment with both free IDE's, and, when given a choice, chose to pay for the more advanced version of whichever suits them better.
There are some interesting features on the feature lists that may be competitive advantages compared t
Never mind that shit!! (Score:4, Insightful)
The best programmers editor evar! Globsub in a column-marked block? No problemo!
Open source it!
Re:Never mind that shit!! (Score:2)
It's a religious thing like vi or Emacs.
Re:Never mind that shit!! (Score:2)
Brief was possibly the best text editor ever made. It was developed by a software company called "UnderWare".
1983 - BRIEF: The Underware corporation releases the BRIEF
(='B'asic 'R'econfigurable 'I'nteractive 'E'diting 'F'acility) text
editor, written by Dave Nanian and Michael Strickman. BRIEF was bought
by Solution Systems, then bought by Borland.
http://www.faqts.com/knowledge_base/view.phtml/aid
Enjoy,
"They're not even human!" (Score:2)
The free version... (Score:2)
Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice (Score:2)
No way I'm going back to Borland for dev tools.
In the late 80's, Turbo Pascal for the Mac was bug-ridden and behind on Mac system call support. A tech support call revealed they knew about it, and didn't care. The tech said that their sales were roughly half the number of copies in use, and it didn't pay for them to continue developing.
In the early 90's, after learning Paradox DOS at a customer request, Paradox Windows came out claiming upward compatibi
Yay case mods! (Score:2)
New versus old. I stick with the proven old. (Score:4, Interesting)
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
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.
Re:New versus old. I stick with the proven old. (Score:2)
- Delphi 6 has WAY better help (what in God's name were they thinking when they changed it?)
- The classic MDI interface is easier to work with
- Being a native Win32 app, the IDE is way faster
Delphi 6 came out in 2001, and for Win32 development it's just as useful to me as it was when I first bought it. I seriously don't understand the C# zealotry. Delphi is simply killer.
A few kind suggestions: (Score:3, Interesting)
All jokes aside (Score:2)
Many of us first learned 'modern' languages with those products..
My rant... (Score:2, Interesting)
... which was the biggest mistake I ever made. Delphi 8 was a such a POS I was shocked that people actually released software
Turbo Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
I grew up with TurboPascal (Score:2)
Compete with M$ (Score:3, Informative)
My students are instructed to bring CD-R's the first week of class so they can get their free VS 2005 Pro. I used to use Borland's Turbo products, many years ago when I was first starting out in college. I don't remember how much I payed for them but I do remember them being student friendly.
How is Borland going to compete when college departments can pay $799 for the first year and $399 for each additional year of the MSDNAA and be able to give their students thousands of dollars worth of free software as well as install that software for free in their labs?
Borland's antique software available (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Borland is confused! (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd try it (Score:2)
Re:Delphi??? (Score:2)
Re:Delphi??? (Score:5, Informative)
Anyway, Delphi is only half of the picture here. There's Turbo C++ and C# offerings along with the native Delphi and Delphi for
Basically, the explorer versions are advanced IDEs for these languages, free of change, allowing commercial development. There's your motivation.
Re:Delphi??? (Score:2)
That said, I'm still hooked on it for cost reasons, it is so much faster and cheaper to develop windows apps in Delphi Pascal than in VC++. Of course, these days, I believe the debate has moved on.
Serious, question, not a troll, is it worth upgrading to the latest?
Re:Delphi??? (Score:2)
However the
Re:Delphi??? (Score:2, Informative)
I was blown away. I created my application in less than 3 days (minus user testing) --- but the best part is that my app was *fa
Re:Delphi??? (Score:2)
The Skype bit was an apt illustration of your point, however.
Turbo Pascal was disruptive (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Tell Blaise that I still have fond memories
Three ways to justify "turbo" (Score:3, Insightful)
But some improvements could still possibly qualify for the "turbo" moniker:
class1.o class2.o class3.o class4.o: class4.h (Score:2)
Offtopic unless Borland cares about those markets. If Borland software can beat G++ even if not Intel's compiler, it has a market. Even if Borland software can compile C++ faster at low optimization levels, it has a market.
You mean like this?
motivation? (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Informative)
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:Turbo C (Score:2)
--
Evan
Re:Turbo C (Score:2)
--
Evan
Re:Delphi??? (Score:2)
Re:Delphi??? (Score:2, Informative)
Sorry, I don't have a clue what you're referring to. Delphi uses Pascal's perfectly commonplace operators chosen to be similar to myriad other Algol-derived or -inspired languages.
Just because you've never dared stray from braces languages doesn't mean that any other convention is "weird", "funky", or deliberately contrary, you know.
Re:Turbo Prolog (Score:2)
And you're disappointed not to see it magically reappear?
By the way, how many Prolog projects are you currently supporting?
Delphi is basically Turbo Pascal on steroids, so you can consider that TP is back.
Re:Turbo Prolog (Score:2, Informative)
Re:How can I be funny? (Score:2, Funny)
Personally, I'd rather be Insightful, because Funny doesn't get you karma.
Re:Where is "turbo java" (Score:2)
JBuilder 200x is the worst application, IDE or otherwise, I have ever had the misfortune of working with. The Swing interface is so horrendously slow and laggy it makes me physically ill to watch a window re
Re:Borland IDE's (Score:2, Informative)
No, I use it in Linux all the time. FreePascal [freepascal.org] and Lazarus [freepascal.org] are being actively developed and are very powerful. Most code you wrote in Delphi/Kylix can be compiled (most of the time with little or no changes) with FPC with the delphi mode compiler directive turned on.