Birbla

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • 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.

    by pjmlp
  • You can try Turbo Pascal (and a few other old coding environment) online here: https://aryx.github.io/ocaml-elm-playground/apps/#programmin...
    by aryx
  • 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.
    by FlyingAvatar
  • 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.
    by 98codes
  • 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.
    by silveira
  • 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.

    by abixb
  • 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.

    by robmusial
  • 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.

    by JdeBP

Explore Birbla archives