Borland Turbo C

For technical reasons, "Turbo C#" redirects here. For the article on the Turbo C# IDE, see Turbo C Sharp.
Borland Turbo C
Developer(s) Borland
Operating system Microsoft Windows, MS-DOS
Type IDE
License Proprietary software

Turbo C is a discontinued Integrated Development Environment and compiler for the C programming language from Borland. First introduced in 1987, it was noted for its integrated development environment, small size, fast compile speed, comprehensive manuals and low price.

In May 1990, Borland replaced Turbo C with Turbo C++. In 2006, Borland reintroduced the Turbo moniker.

Early history

In the early 1980s, Borland enjoyed considerable success with their Turbo Pascal product and it became a popular choice when developing applications for the PC. Borland followed up that success by releasing Turbo Basic, Turbo Prolog and Turbo C. Turbo C had the same properties as Turbo Pascal: an integrated development environment, a fast compiler (though not near the speed of Turbo Pascal[1]), a good editor, and a competitive price.


Turbo C was not as successful as the Pascal-sister product. First, C was a language for professional programming and systems development rather than a school language. Turbo C competed with other professional programming tools (Microsoft C, Lattice C, Watcom C, etc.). Turbo C did, however, have advantages in speed of compiled code, large project support and price. It is developed in C.

Version history

Version 1.0 (May 13, 1987) offered the first integrated development environment for C on IBM PCs. Like many Borland products of the time, the software was bought from another company (in this case Wizard C by Bob Jervis[2]), and branded with the "Turbo" name. It ran in 384 kB of memory. It allowed inline assembly with full access to C symbolic names and structures, supported all memory models, and offered optimizations for speed, size, constant folding, and jump elimination.[3]

Version 1.5 (January 1988) was an incremental improvement over version 1.0. It included more sample programs, improved manuals and bug fixes. It was shipped on five 360 KB diskettes of uncompressed files, and came with sample C programs, including a stripped down spreadsheet called mcalc. This version introduced the <conio.h> header file (which provided fast, PC-specific console I/O routines).

Version 2.0 (late 1988) featured the first "blue screen" version, which would be typical of all future Borland releases for MS-DOS. The American release did not have Turbo Assembler or a separate debugger. (These were sold separately as Turbo Assembler.) Turbo C, Asm, and Debugger were sold together as a suite. This seems to describe another release: Featured Turbo Debugger, Turbo Assembler, and an extensive graphics library. This version of Turbo C was also released (in Germany only) for the Atari ST; the program was not maintained by Borland, but sold and renamed PureC.

With the release of Turbo C++ 1.0 (in 1990), the two products were folded into one and the name "Turbo C" was discontinued. The C++ compiler was developed under contract by a company in San Diego, and was one of the first "true" compilers for C++ (until then, it was common to use pre-compilers that generated C code, ref. Cfront).

Freeware release

In 2006, Borland's successor, Embarcadero Technologies, re-released Turbo C and the MS-DOS versions of the Turbo C++ compilers as freeware.[4][5][6]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Hague, James. "A Personal History of Compilation Speed, Part 2". Programming in the 21st Century.
  2. ↑ Borland Backgrounder
  3. ↑ foldoc.org - FOLDOC entry on Turbo C
  4. ↑ http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/41337
  5. ↑ http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/20841
  6. ↑ http://edn.embarcadero.com/article/21751

External links

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