The Borland Museum(s)
Although I heard about it years ago, I never went to the Borland Museum in part because I had my own. I've never been able to part with any of my Borland software (of which I have owned most over the years) and it's all still there in a box somewhere, even bizarre things like the Sprint word processor, the Reflex database, and the Turbo Pascal Editor Toolbox. Alas, I haven't looked at a lot of it in ten years or more, and in fact I don't even have a 5 1/4" floppy drive mounted on a machine here in the house. (I have two of them on the shelf.) Furthermore, I have a suspicion that entropy has claimed a lot of the original Borland floppies, not that I'll need to use Reflex anytime soon.
But rejoice: Even if your floppies have rotted, you can now download the following Borland products for free from the Borland Museum:
- Turbo Pascal 1.0
- Turbo Pascal 3.02
- Turbo Pascal 5.5 (Plus, my OOP Guide is downloadable here.)
- Turbo C++ 1.01
- Turbo C++ 2.01
(There are posted promises of more to come.) Although I have TP 3.02 on hard disk here, I downloaded it anyway just to see the system work. The file is only 167 KB in size, egad. I discovered that even the 1990-vintage 3 1/2" diskette on which I had all my old Complete Turbo Pascal code listings wouldn't read, and had to be content running the demos that came with the product. I grinned to see that the turtle graphics demo still put my enormous 21.4" portrait-mode LCD into CGA medium-res mode, albeit in landscape mode. Even at its slowest speed, the turtle moved almost too quickly to follow, and at its fastest speed wasn't even a blur.
It only took a minute or so to get my TP 3.0 IDE legs back, but once I did I was jotting out little programs in seconds, even with the requirement of having PROGRAM...BEGIN...END. as a necessary framework. So if Johnny wants to bash code and get feedback in a hurry, this could be the way to do it.
Now I have to go looking for a usable floppy with all my old book code examples in it. Complete Turbo Pascal is now 21 years old. (You can still get used copies on Amazon...for 48 cents.) How the hell could we have been at it that long?