The manuals were great. I taught myself C/C++ in the early 90s mostly from the big stack of Borland books that came with Turbo C++. It’s hard to imagine learning something like that these days by simply sitting down and reading reference manuals.

Turbo Vision for a long time was for me like a golden standard. All the new TUI frameworks seemed like they were missing something.

Now I will get to see if that was just a nostalgia. Gonna use this in the next tool. Huge kudos to the authors <3

Indeed, except for GW-BASIC and MS-DOS, for me it was Borland all the way.

Turbo BASIC, Turbo Pascal, Turbo C++ for MS-DOS and Windows 3.x, Turbo Vision and OWL.

Got into VC+ on version 5, and MFC always felt so lame compared with Borland offerings.

To this day, they don't have anything that can match C++ Builder RAD capabilities, and even with the historic background, it has taken a few years for .NET to get the low level coding and AOT story straight, Delphi like.

We should give Go, C++ and Rust folks a few copies of Turbo Pascal 7 for MS-DOS, and Delphi current.