Borland has decided to re-launch their development tools using the old Turbo brand name, perhaps as a precursor to a spin-out of the tools division. The Turbo brand name was very well known among programmers in the 1980s and early 1990s and Borland stood out in the market for providing the fastest compilers and highest productivity tools with its then unique Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). As the years went by, the Turbo name fell by the wayside as new products like Borland C++, Delphi and JBuilder raised the stakes for Windows development. Delphi was a pretty amazing system in its day and it combined the best of Rapid Application Development and native code compiler performance in a way that no one thought possible back in 1995.
I'm not sure that many people will upgrade their products just because of the old (or is it new?) Turbo name, but for folks building Windows applications they are still great tools. While they are not open source, Borland has introduced Express Explorer editions that are free of charge and pretty darned good.
Here's a few links to the news stories and some slightly embarassing historical artifacts. Yes, that's me in a cheesy Turbo Pascal instructional video from nearly 15 years ago. I think my wife gave away that shirt when we got married.
- Borland: Announces Availability of Turbo Products
- TurboExplorer: Home, Downloads, News
- PC Mag: Borland Salutes Turbo Spirit, Review
- YouTube: Turbo Tool Time, Delphi Oktoberfest
- YouTube: Embarassing Turbo Pascal video
Great TP Video Zack - personally I like to watch it just for the intro soundtrack :) btw the Turbo's include all of the latest 2006 Windows development features including support for MySQL out of the box! So anyone can download any of the Turbo's and quickly build MySQL powered Windows GUI, Web apps and WebServices - for free. And if someone is just starting out they can watch your TP tutorial vid and will be learning the language essentials of Turbo Delphi at the same time (Turbo Delphi is the modern OO and component based evolution of Turbo Pascal). Too cool!
Posted by: Michael Swindell | September 05, 2006 at 06:27 PM
This is too funny. I didn't need to see more than 10s of thst TP presentation to think "I've seen this before..." ... and I never made the connection to you Zack before this moment :-)
Posted by: Carsten Pedersen | September 06, 2006 at 04:46 AM