Turbo C

Turbo C is an integrated entry level C programming environment for DOS originally introduced by Borland in 1987.

History
Turbo C as it was shipped in 1987 was basically a re-release of the Wizard C compiler minus the LINT package but with the Borland frontend tools such as the IDE from Turbo Pascal included. The entire 1.x branch of the toolkit proved extremely problematic, the compiler in the 1.0x versions was buggy and needed further work and with the 1.5 release there was a replacement library that was not only full of errors but inconsistent as well, it is not until the 2.01 release which had been largely rewritten from scratch that the tool becomes a worthwhile development tool.

Apart from the technical issues, Turbo C became a watershed in Borland history as it caused founder Nils Jensen to leave the company and found Jensen and Partners International.

Note that the product was replaced in 1990 with Turbo C++ 1.0 product which is basically Turbo C v3 with the TauMetric C++ preprocessor added on.

Turbo C for Atari ST was developed by Softdesign (Pure Software) from Munich. In July 1991 Borland transferred the rights back to them, so later versions were released under the name Pure C.

Versions

 * May 1987: 1.0
 * Jan 1988: 1.5
 * Nov 1988: 2.0 - Professional version includes Turbo Assembler and Turbo Debugger.
 * May 1989: 2.01
 * 1990: Turbo C for Atari ST 2.0

Publications

 * Herbert Schildt: Using Turbo C - Osborne/McGraw-Hill 1987, ISBN 0-07-881279-8
 * Herbert Schildt: Advanced Turbo C - Osborne/McGraw-Hill 1987, ISBN 0-07-881280-1
 * Kris A. Jamsa: Turbo C Programmers Library – Osborne/McGraw-Hill 1988, ISBN 0-07-881394-8
 * Nabajyoti Barkakati: Waite Group's Turbo C Bible - Sams 1988, ISBN 0-672-22631-6
 * Chao C. Chien: Programmer's Guide to Turbo C 2.0 - Bantam 1989, ISBN 0-553-34757-8
 * Ben Ezzell: Graphics Programming in Turbo C 2.0 - Addison-Wesley 1989, ISBN 0-201-19443-0

Links

 * Antique Software