The Borland Museum(s)

[jeff_duntemann]

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

Comments

broken promises

[anonymous]

While it's nice to have the Borland Museum, I met with David I several years ago and hand carried to him a copy of TP 2.01, which was to have been put on the museum. As you note, it is not there.

I used to have all my old Borland software and manuals, but having moved more often than you, I have reluctantly shed many of them.

On the other hand, I never considered Sprint bizarre. In fact, I bought a previously unopened copy on ebay a couple of years ago for $10. Before Sprint appeared, I had a love/hate relationship with MS Word on DOS, and had theorized that a possibly ideal word processor would come in two parts: editor and output processor. Then I got Sprint, and never looked back. A great text editor is so far superior to any WYSIWYG tool that there is no comparison. The trap of WYSIWYG is that you fiddle with appearance, and are distracted too often from content. Or so it seems to me. Now and again I find an old printout of something rendered in Sprint, and to this day, those docs impress.

I think that TP 3.02 could be a great response to David Brin's complaint. And it's certainly tremendously better than any flavor of BASIC. Maybe we need a project to reproduce the 3.02 manual as a PDF? I don't know whether I still have mine... A few years ago, I scanned in the TP 5.5 OOP intro, and then fixed the errors from scanning, and republished in PDF. Your link points to that file. It was a pretty intense three day project.

I still consider your work at Borland to have produced the best docs they ever published. And certainly the most readable and coherent. I read the TP4 manual in a marathon, and it was terrific.

Bill Meyer

Re: broken promises

[jeff_duntemann]

Sprint was bizarre mostly in terms of what went on behind the scenes; it worked well and mostly got conked when everybody moved to Win95 almost overnight and Word for Windows came into its own. Until Coriolis standardized on Word, I used Word Perfect 4.2 under DOS, and it bore a lot of resemblance to Sprint without the fully programmable undercarriage that came in from Mark of the Unicorn.

Now what I'm casting about for is a simple and freely downloadable Pascal compiler/interpreter that works in a Windows window. I'm going to look around in the Pascal FOSS world this afternoon and see if anybody has anything. The transition from Windows to text mode in a DOS box is abrupt and ugly, by young people's standards. (You and I feel differently, but you and I are...old.)

Finally, I need to be honest here: I did very little of the TP4 manual. Most of the work was done by Bruce Webster, and he did a very good job indeed. I might have contributed more but while it was coming together I was on staff creating Turbo Technix.

Re: broken promises

[anonymous]

Then a hat-tip to Bruce Webster, but at the same time, I thought Turbo Technix was great, and the best marketing Borland ever did.

My feelings about Word (Im)Perfect won't bear repeating in a public forum. A mild summary would be to declare it an unmitigated piece of excrement.

What was done by Mark of the Unicorn was so far better than contemporary tools, that it was truly remarkable.

Yes, you and I are old. Old enough to have read much by Tony Hoare, Nicklaus Wirth, and others responsible for reasoning out so much of what is today taken for granted. Old is also a prerequisite for venerable, lest you forget. ;)

If you cannot find the Pascal item you wish for, why not avail yourself of Jack Crenshaw's series on building a compiler, and roll your own? Yes, I know, there are only so many hours in a day, but still...

Bill Meyer

Re: broken promises

[jeff_duntemann]

Turbo Technix was great fun to do, and we had a spectacular team working on it. That was the best job I ever had working for somebody else.

Just now I downloaded iaa-Pascal from SourceForge:

http://iaa-pascal.sourceforge.net/en/index.php

It's a Pascal interpreter intended for educational use, running in a Windows window and written in Delphi as a one-piece Win32 executable. Perfect...except that it's localized to Polish. I have a lot of Polish in my ancestry, but the language doesn't come with the genes, but from what I can tell it's just the thing.

I'll keep looking, but this is pretty much what I have in mind.

Re: broken promises

[anonymous]

Remember Alice? I seem to recall that it's now downloadable. If you missed it, it was a ca. 1985 thing that gave a Pascal environment, and tried to provide something akin to a lookup for coding, as I recall.

In fact, a short google on "Alice pascal" turned up this: http://www.templetons.com/brad/alice.html

What do you think? PC and Atari(!) versions are now free, and source (for Linux) can be had.

If nothing else, it's an interesting artifact, but it was built for teaching coding.

Re: broken promises

[anonymous]

FYI, I have found that any 3.5" disk that is more than 6-7 years old is potentially a head-clogger. My theory is that something in the media renders it more hygroscopic than the older 5.25" stuff, which is still mostly readable -- albeit on an older motherboard.

I have no science to back up my guess, but given that I spent 10 years in Ben Lomond, where moisture is one of life's few constants....

Bill Meyer