Turbo C

History

Turbo C is an integrated entry level C programming environment for DOS originally introduced by Borland in 1987, it was basically a re-release of the Wizard C compiler minus the LINT package but with the Borland front end tools such as the IDE from the Turbo Pascal et al bolted on. 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 form 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
• 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 – September 1, 1988 - Osborne/McGraw-Hill - Paperback, 701 pages - ISBN 0078813948 - ISBN 978-0078813948 - Out of print

Links

• Antique Software

License and availability

• Discontinued commercial software.

Publisher & authors

• Bob Jervis
• Wizard Systems Software
• Borland
• Softdesign