Live data from Hacker News

Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

github.com

21–30 of 96 posts

Re: Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

#22

Unfortunately, I'm afraid, since this is based on the actual source code of Turbo Vision, it's non-free, so it's unusable for open source projects.

Wikipedia says there was an official Borland public domain release of the source code, which this is probably based on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision

Re: Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

#24
post #19

Unfortunately, I'm afraid, since this is based on the actual source code of Turbo Vision, it's non-free, so it's unusable for open source projects.

Man I hope you are wrong.. because I was literally planning to build an IDE for Algorand/Python/PyTEAL with this (I know, mentioning Algorand is an automatic downvote, oh well). You might be right.. but I am not sure. Could Borland really sue you or something, many years they release the full source code "as is", "provided gratuitously", "no support", "no updates"? I mean it doesn't explicitly say "public domain", bu…

I hope I am wrong. But I don't see anywhere in the text of this license any explicit permission to use it for any purpose, it's basically only a warranty disclaimer, unless some bits were omitted by accident.

Re: Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

#25
post #19

Unfortunately, I'm afraid, since this is based on the actual source code of Turbo Vision, it's non-free, so it's unusable for open source projects.

Man I hope you are wrong.. because I was literally planning to build an IDE for Algorand/Python/PyTEAL with this (I know, mentioning Algorand is an automatic downvote, oh well). You might be right.. but I am not sure. Could Borland really sue you or something, many years they release the full source code "as is", "provided gratuitously", "no support", "no updates"? I mean it doesn't explicitly say "public domain", bu…

For anything Python, I recommend you try rich/textual.

Re: Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

#26

Btw those text based interfaces are better than most gui/web interfaces of today.

Windows 95 was the peak of good UX, like the ancient Greek was the peak of statue crafting. Some things were better in the past.

No post body was provided.

Re: Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

#27
post #19

Unfortunately, I'm afraid, since this is based on the actual source code of Turbo Vision, it's non-free, so it's unusable for open source projects.

Man I hope you are wrong.. because I was literally planning to build an IDE for Algorand/Python/PyTEAL with this (I know, mentioning Algorand is an automatic downvote, oh well). You might be right.. but I am not sure. Could Borland really sue you or something, many years they release the full source code "as is", "provided gratuitously", "no support", "no updates"? I mean it doesn't explicitly say "public domain", bu…

I very much doubt you can get into trouble for using Turbo Vision as an external dependency. There are already projects using it, e.g. https://github.com/electroly/tmbasic.

Re: Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

#28
Turbo Vision was very fun to use and I made a good bit of money contracting on small projects in grad school in the early 90s using it. It made writing text mode guis a breeze. Borland's later Object Windows Library (OWL) was, in my opinion, much clunkier but it was done in C++ compared to Turbo Vision's Pascal.

Probably the most interesting app I did was a small quality control/stats app for this book: "Quality Control 4th Edition" (https://www.amazon.com/Quality-Control-Dale-H-Besterfield/dp...). All the data entry used Turbo Vison and all the graphs and charts used BGI (Borland Graphics Interface). It was meant for student use but I found out later it was used by Jim Beam on their whiskey distillery production line.

Re: Modern Turbo Vision 2.0

#29
post #10

Turbo Vision is odd. It's a backport of a graphical UI (Windows 3.0) to text mode. It was exceptionally well done in both end user and developer ease of use and caught on. But I doubt it's the optimum for a text based UI, at least for most applications. Keep evolving!

There were text mode UIs well before Windows 3.0 - Microsoft had their own TUIs, similar to Turbo Vision but with a subtly different style. They even supported a "monochrome mode" option that wouldn't look out of place on a VT-100 terminal.
Post reply on HN