Adam Vandenberg ([info]piehead) wrote,
@ 2005-03-30 22:15:00
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Entry tags:programming, retro

Antique Software: Turbo Pascal version 5.5

Now there's a blast from the past. I learned object-oriented programming (badly!) on that version.


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[info]ivorjawa
2005-03-31 03:30 am UTC (link)
I love the old Borland packaging.

I learned C++ from Turbo C++ 3.0, which I bought with the $50 I had left over after I came back from Germany in 1993. I used to have coding wars with [info]agentcooper, me writing in C and him in Turbo Pascal.

Later, I did a lot of work with Delphi, and it amazed me how much cleaner it was than C++ for OOP.

Christ, I miss Classic Borland. How did they ever manage to fuck up to the degree they did?

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[info]piehead
2005-03-31 01:45 pm UTC (link)
"How did they ever manage to fuck up to the degree they did?"

They started to forget that they were a dev tools company, and started to think they were a productivity company too (probably because one of their first big apps was "Sidekick", a TSR for DOS that did some productivity stuff.)

Remember when they had those office apps, Paradox (DB), Word Perfect (I think? Did they own this for a while?), Quattro Pro (spreadsheet)?

Trying to compete with Microsoft in the office space sucked the life right out of the company. Whereas their dev tools were better than Microsoft's own stuff.

A pryhic victory: Borland's office suite more or less pioneered using the right-click menu as a context menu (on Win 3.1, I'm sure on other OSes it was already used like that), which Microsoft ran with for Windows 95.

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[info]keith83
2005-03-31 04:39 am UTC (link)
I learned to program on Turbo Pascal! I don't know what version it was though. A few years after I'd left high school, and after they'd changed the AP test to C++ (and before they changed it again to Java), I wanted to get one of the Pascal books we'd learned with from my high school, but they threw them out or something. Sigh.

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[info]piehead
2005-03-31 01:47 pm UTC (link)
I learned to program (badly!) on a Commdore 64, but my first real PC programming was Turbo Pascal 4. What an IDE!

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[info]piehead
2005-03-31 06:46 pm UTC (link)
I have a long history of using Borland dev tools, and I used so many versions of C/C++/Pascal for DOS. They lost me when C++ for Windows was so crap-tastic that I returned it [to the student bookstore] shortly after buying it. I guess they eventually patched the hell out of it, but that was that.

Though they won me back briefly with Delphi, which I actually used on a job to build a DB front end. Sooo much better than Visual Basic, in my opinion.

Microsoft must have thought so too, as they sniped Anders Hejlsberg to work on C#/.NET. C# looks so much like Dephi-with-Java-syntax.

Borland/Delphi actually influenced Java a bit, especially Beans, Actions, and the like.

And what was with that whole renaming to Inprise thing? Way to manage your brand there guys.

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