1. If you've ever heard of TurboVision, this UI is similar to it. But actual TurboVision as it was later to be found in Borland programs, and as even can be found in clones today, did not have this look and feel, which would have seemed a little clunky for a TUI by the end of the 1980s.
1. Notice that F1 is already help, but the other function keys do not follow the CUA pattern that was only actually formalized that same year.
1. Notice the differently coloured letters for the shortcut keys for menu entries, something that has largely vanished nowadays.
1. Notice how wasteful of 80×25 area some of the windows are. It was not long before everyone had shrunk the application menu down to 1 row. Conversely, though, look how colour is used to demarcate function key names, rather than using square brackets.
1. Scroll Lock is actually a major part of the user interface. A number of MC/PC/DR-DOS programs at the time gave a use to Scroll Lock. In Turbo BASIC, it switched (as it says in the screen shot) into and out of a mode where the arrow keys moved/resized things.
Like a lot of 90s kids my first language was BASIC via QBasic. After feeling like I had outgrown that I went looking for a "real" language to learn and landed on C++. The cost of Borland Turbo C++ 4.5 for a young kid, and my parents not being into computers so not keen on funding me, led me to ask for alternatives on IRC. I was told about [GNU/]Linux coming with a C/C++ compiler for free! I ordered a Red Hat CDROM from cheap*bytes and never looked back.
Had Borland not been so expensive or had the stranger on IRC known or told me GCC existed for DOS/Windows who knows where my career would be today.
In a weird way though I never used it, hearing about Borland Turbo anything still makes me happy because it reminds me of something I thought was unobtainium.
>my parents not being into computers so not keen on funding me
I feel this. I recall distinctly back in the mid '80s my mom, talking about my intense interest in computers: "It's great to have a hobby, but at some point you're going to need to figure out what you want to do for a real job."
very similar childhood. my old man was a fortran dev in the 80s and so i had access to a lot of the borland tools thru his work. what a time to be a curious mind, i miss those days very much.
OMG cheapbytes. I also ordered a RedHat CD-ROM from cheapbytes. I used it to install Linux onto my roommate's laptop at Santa Clara - without his knowledge or approval in advance. Whoops!
I hung out on #C from 92-96 quite a bit. The most shocking part of your story was that people didn't recommend an ftp site where you could get anything you wanted for free.
Oh they definitely did give me FTP sites, I just didn't want to ramble too much. I think at that time I had a USRobotics 33.6 sportster and a shared line with the rest of the house. Downloading large-ish files even overnight was a no go. My mom was a school teacher and the thought of her missing a call from the district about a snow day or other calamity would have been a disaster!
I absolutely loved the help docs that came in Borland products. To this day they are my gold standard of documentation and nothing has ever meet them. I learned so much simply navigating their docs. The best part was that they had actual examples that you could see it working, copy/paste modify. To an extent, a taste of open source.
A friend and I built our first "game" in Turbo Basic. It was fairly capable and being able to make an EXE out of a basic program felt like magic when GW-Basic and QBasic were the only other basic's we were had ever used on a PC. Several years later VB for DOS was also pretty impressive with a text-mode form designer.
I graduated quickly from Borland Turbo Basic to Turbo Pascal, and really wish I'd bothered to hold onto all those old floppies. I do still have a Visual Studio / VSCode color settings file that matches the old look -- I used those colors for a good long time, longer than it took me to stop coding in all caps.
I own it, it was a great introduction to compiled BASIC, on MS-DOS 3.3!
Thus I don't have the same affinity to QBasic, as others do, I had already enjoyed compiled BASIC and systems programming in BASIC by the time MS-DOS 5 came out.
Great memories, and eventually made the jump into Turbo Pascal.
I really miss the old Borland Turbo [*] days, both in terms of the languages and the IDEs. (Turbo BASIC wasn't my first BASIC, but Turbo Pascal and Turbo C were absolutely formative for me.)
VS Code had a little bit of that feel, but it's grown so much and added so many features that it's lost it. And the closest thing I've found to the feeling of writing C in the 90s was Arduino sketches a decade ago.
I still tinker with it, now and again. Though I admit I get distracted and mostly run stuff under BBC BASIC (with it's integrated assembly support), and then switch to replaying Zork!
They used Turbo Basic in Dbase 3 & 4 as well. It was so useful that Foxpro built a migration tool to port your dbase databases and code to Foxpro. Some of the first floppies I carried with me everywhere were my Dbase databases and basic programs.
1. If you've ever heard of TurboVision, this UI is similar to it. But actual TurboVision as it was later to be found in Borland programs, and as even can be found in clones today, did not have this look and feel, which would have seemed a little clunky for a TUI by the end of the 1980s.
1. Notice that F1 is already help, but the other function keys do not follow the CUA pattern that was only actually formalized that same year.
1. Notice the differently coloured letters for the shortcut keys for menu entries, something that has largely vanished nowadays.
1. Notice how wasteful of 80×25 area some of the windows are. It was not long before everyone had shrunk the application menu down to 1 row. Conversely, though, look how colour is used to demarcate function key names, rather than using square brackets.
1. Scroll Lock is actually a major part of the user interface. A number of MC/PC/DR-DOS programs at the time gave a use to Scroll Lock. In Turbo BASIC, it switched (as it says in the screen shot) into and out of a mode where the arrow keys moved/resized things.
This interface is magical when comparing with Turbo Pascal 3.3 and 4.0.
I don't recall any longer correctly, but I think Turbo Basic even supported dual monitor debugging sessions.
Had Borland not been so expensive or had the stranger on IRC known or told me GCC existed for DOS/Windows who knows where my career would be today.
In a weird way though I never used it, hearing about Borland Turbo anything still makes me happy because it reminds me of something I thought was unobtainium.
I feel this. I recall distinctly back in the mid '80s my mom, talking about my intense interest in computers: "It's great to have a hobby, but at some point you're going to need to figure out what you want to do for a real job."
And here I've turned my hobby into a living.
Thus I don't have the same affinity to QBasic, as others do, I had already enjoyed compiled BASIC and systems programming in BASIC by the time MS-DOS 5 came out.
Great memories, and eventually made the jump into Turbo Pascal.
1. You can see them in my recent submissions. Don't want to shill.
VS Code had a little bit of that feel, but it's grown so much and added so many features that it's lost it. And the closest thing I've found to the feeling of writing C in the 90s was Arduino sketches a decade ago.
https://github.com/skx/cpmulator
There's also a repository of curated/vintage programs, including Turbo Pascal here:
https://github.com/skx/cpm-dist
I still tinker with it, now and again. Though I admit I get distracted and mostly run stuff under BBC BASIC (with it's integrated assembly support), and then switch to replaying Zork!
https://archive.org/details/000376-BorlandTurboBasic10>
https://archive.org/details/BorlandTurboBasic1.0German
https://archive.org/details/turbotoolbox
In the time I was willing to spend, I did not see a 1.1 release.
QB64 is pretty popular as a sort of QBASIC-dialect with additional features like OpenGL, multimedia support, etc.
FreeBasic is decent as well but its focus is more on being a compiler whereas QB64 aims to be more batteries-included with its builtin IDE.
https://github.com/QB64-Phoenix-Edition/QB64pe
https://github.com/freebasic/fbc