My programming career literally started in a dumpster in the ’90s, when I found a Turbo Vision book someone had thrown away. I picked it up and immediately fell in love with the bluish TUIs that anyone could make.
it is still very well usable - i used TV 2.0 year ago to do some prototype. i wanted (and mostly succeeded) to create turbovision front end for LLDB debugger... you know, that would behave like Borland's Turbo Debugger.
few quick notes:
- blimey it was like it where i left it 199x :) you can even compile/run code from 1993 without major issues.
- there's even a better internal TV editor based on scintilla, so with syntax highlighting and such. although i was trying to mod it without success, i'll have to ask author for help, probably.
- there's no documentation (in the sense of common wisdom), so you can't ask stack overflow or AI. you have to do it like in old days: learn from examples (that have bugs in them ;) and read those few books on turbo vision again and again.
- manual 'layouting' is kinda annoying, some auto layout like qt would be handy
- i miss splitters, but that should not be hard to implement
- tbh i am kinda surprised how small and compact TV really is. it felt ginormous in the 90ies :)
overall - the author did very good job modernizing the library and i love it.
The manuals were great. I taught myself C/C++ in the early 90s mostly from the big stack of Borland books that came with Turbo C++. It’s hard to imagine learning something like that these days by simply sitting down and reading reference manuals.
Indeed, except for GW-BASIC and MS-DOS, for me it was Borland all the way.
Turbo BASIC, Turbo Pascal, Turbo C++ for MS-DOS and Windows 3.x, Turbo Vision and OWL.
Got into VC+ on version 5, and MFC always felt so lame compared with Borland offerings.
To this day, they don't have anything that can match C++ Builder RAD capabilities, and even with the historic background, it has taken a few years for .NET to get the low level coding and AOT story straight, Delphi like.
We should give Go, C++ and Rust folks a few copies of Turbo Pascal 7 for MS-DOS, and Delphi current.
The original version came with Turbo Pascal 6, the C++ port came later.
So this is a modern port of the port. :)
Borland did the same with other frameworks OWL came first in Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.5, and many of C++ Builder tools are actually written in Delphi.
Anyway, Turbo Pascal 5.5 adoption of Object Pascal, followed by Turbo Vision on version 6, was my introduction to OOP, and it I was lucky have gone that path.
Got to learn OOP, and all the goodies that Turbo Vision offered as a framework in an environment like MS-DOS.
My programming career literally started in a dumpster in the ’90s, when I found a Turbo Vision book someone had thrown away. I picked it up and immediately fell in love with the bluish TUIs that anyone could make.
I am still wishing for the "real" Turbo Vision, the Pascal version because the C++ one is more like a port of the Pascal one.
"Uses" is keyword in Pascal, for example, so "including" a module by "#define"-ing feels like a "hack"
I guess it doesn't matter, nowadays.
it is still very well usable - i used TV 2.0 year ago to do some prototype. i wanted (and mostly succeeded) to create turbovision front end for LLDB debugger... you know, that would behave like Borland's Turbo Debugger.
few quick notes:
- blimey it was like it where i left it 199x :) you can even compile/run code from 1993 without major issues.
- there's even a better internal TV editor based on scintilla, so with syntax highlighting and such. although i was trying to mod it without success, i'll have to ask author for help, probably.
- there's no documentation (in the sense of common wisdom), so you can't ask stack overflow or AI. you have to do it like in old days: learn from examples (that have bugs in them ;) and read those few books on turbo vision again and again.
- manual 'layouting' is kinda annoying, some auto layout like qt would be handy
- i miss splitters, but that should not be hard to implement
- tbh i am kinda surprised how small and compact TV really is. it felt ginormous in the 90ies :)
overall - the author did very good job modernizing the library and i love it.
Supercool .. the universe of possibilities really exploded when Borland came out with Turbo Pascal compiler, Turbo C++ and TurboVision.
Compiler performance was superb and the manuals were a work of art - I just wished I had kept all of mine.
This is a cultural treasure.
The manuals were great. I taught myself C/C++ in the early 90s mostly from the big stack of Borland books that came with Turbo C++. It’s hard to imagine learning something like that these days by simply sitting down and reading reference manuals.
Turbo Vision for a long time was for me like a golden standard. All the new TUI frameworks seemed like they were missing something.
Now I will get to see if that was just a nostalgia. Gonna use this in the next tool. Huge kudos to the authors <3
Indeed, except for GW-BASIC and MS-DOS, for me it was Borland all the way.
Turbo BASIC, Turbo Pascal, Turbo C++ for MS-DOS and Windows 3.x, Turbo Vision and OWL.
Got into VC+ on version 5, and MFC always felt so lame compared with Borland offerings.
To this day, they don't have anything that can match C++ Builder RAD capabilities, and even with the historic background, it has taken a few years for .NET to get the low level coding and AOT story straight, Delphi like.
We should give Go, C++ and Rust folks a few copies of Turbo Pascal 7 for MS-DOS, and Delphi current.
The original version came with Turbo Pascal 6, the C++ port came later.
So this is a modern port of the port. :)
Borland did the same with other frameworks OWL came first in Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.5, and many of C++ Builder tools are actually written in Delphi.
Anyway, Turbo Pascal 5.5 adoption of Object Pascal, followed by Turbo Vision on version 6, was my introduction to OOP, and it I was lucky have gone that path.
Got to learn OOP, and all the goodies that Turbo Vision offered as a framework in an environment like MS-DOS.
A good related post & discussion to this for various memory lanes:
IDEs we had 30 years ago and lost (2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45626910
DOS still a target. Respect.
See also Final Cut
https://github.com/gansm/finalcut