Turbo C setup

Turbo C was an Integrated Development Environment and compiler for the C programming language from Borland. It was first introduced in 1987 and was noted for its integrated development environment, small size, extremely fast compile speed, comprehensive manuals and low price.

* Version 1.0, on May 13, 1987 - It offered the first integrated edit-compile-run development environment for C on IBM PCs. The software was, like many Borland products of the time, bought from another company and branded with the "Turbo" name, in this case Wizard C by Bob Jervis[1] [2] (The flagship Borland product at that time, Turbo Pascal, which at this time did not have pull-down menus, would be given a facelift with version 4 released late in 1987 to make it look more like Turbo C.) It ran in 384KB 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]

Turbo C 1.5 startup screen.

* Version 1.5, in January 1988 - This was an incremental improvement over version 1.0. It included more sample programs, improved manuals and other 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 header file (which provided fast, PC-specific console I/O routines). (Note: The copyright date in the startup screen is 1987, but the files in the system distribution were created in January 1988.)

Turbo C 2.0 startup screen.

* Version 2.0, in 1989 - The American release was in late 1988, and 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 being sold separately as the product Turbo Assembler.) See this ad for details: Turbo C, Asm, and Debugger were sold together as a professional suite of tools. This seems to describe another release: Featured Turbo Debugger, Turbo Assembler, and an extensive graphics library. This version of Turbo C was also released for the Atari ST, but distributed in Germany only.


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