Delphi History: The Turbo Comeback
Who still remembers the comeback of the Turbo editions? Back in the day the community was calling for a “Free Delphi” from Borland, especially as Microsoft was flooding the developer tools market with Visual Studio Express.
Borland reacted and initiated the Turbo editions. I was recently reminded of this, due to the recent release of the Delphi Starter Edition. Just like back in the day, some people still complain about a wonderful free product that offers an awesome toolset. There are plenty of posts out there that describe the features and restrictions of the Delphi Starter Edition in great detail.
One thing has to be said though: The Turbo Editions were much more restrictive. They did not come with any database stuff and restricted the installation of 3rd party tools as the command line compilers were not included. I am not 100% certain, but I also think that the IDE did not allow for tools like GExperts or CnPack to be installed.
What makes this cup extra special is the fact that it was a gift from the Borland developer team in Stockholm, Sweden. Namely, Jan, Jesper, Jonas, Henrik and Fredrick for my voluntary work for the ECO framework.
It is also black-yellow which makes my soccer heart feel warmer…
Time flies guys!
Very nice!
Wow, that brings back old memories 🙂 Well deserved cup and we had a lot of fun together!
Yes, the Turbo edition did not allow installing components and plugins. There was a simple way around it though: You could still load the user package and you could put any code into it you wanted, so you could load other packages and plugins from there.
Btw: There were two different Turbo editions, the free one and the Turbo Professional editions that allowed these things again.
Among my most-missed software products of those days:
— Turbo Pascal (for PC),
— Borland Reflex for Mac (which was so much more elegant and productive than the PC version)
My most-missed non-Borland products:
— the wonderful Think Pascal (Mac)
— WriteNow (Mac)