Live data from Hacker News

Borland Turbo Assembler Version 5 User's Guide (1996) [pdf]

bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de

11–20 of 60 posts

Re: Borland Turbo Assembler Version 5 User's Guide (1996) [pdf]

#11
post #5

In page 44 onwards, this describes how to do class-based OOP with assembly language extensions to generate vtable calls. I wonder who ever used that…

OOP hype was peaking in the mid-90's when TASM 5 came out. Probably some manager's idea to capitalise on that.

Re: Borland Turbo Assembler Version 5 User's Guide (1996) [pdf]

#13

Borland C++ 3.1 was the epitome of documentation. The retail packaging was about the width of 7 pieces of big box software and it weighed quite a bit more from the "encyclopedia set" it included. The assembler quick reference guide for TASM was better in 3.1 than in either 4 or 5. It was also spiral bound with a white comb. Although updated with features, 4 and 5 reduced the amount of documentation significantly.

All Turbo Pascal editions up to TPW 1.5 also had plenty of nice manuals, and in similar number.

Re: Borland Turbo Assembler Version 5 User's Guide (1996) [pdf]

#14
post #4

Borland manuals were a pure delight.. as was the speed of Turbo Pascal compilation and the elegance of their text mode windowing object system. I remember scouring all the possible BBS dialup file servers to find a compiler for my first 8086 machine .. I knew there had to be something better than GW Basic .. I could not find a compiler for free, but did happen up on A86 assembler, so got an intro to how the machine r…

Me too, like as it used to be in those days, we could get all kinds of software in Portuguese bazars at the cost of the material being copied.

However when I could afford the student editions of Borland products available to high school students, I bought TPW and Turbo C++ 3.1 for Windows, first TPW, and then TC++ an year later.

Re: Borland Turbo Assembler Version 5 User's Guide (1996) [pdf]

#15
post #12

My favourite Assembler, in those days I would imagine Assembly would be the way to keep coding going forward, how wrong I was.

A friend of mine used to be a big proponent of this. His theory being that sure, you need someone special to be very productive in assembly. But there's a billion of Chinese where the market is just opening up… (So I guess it was a few assembly geniuses for your OS and productivity software and the rest of us mortals filling in with the less performant rest written in C++ or E or Blitz Basic something)

Re: Borland Turbo Assembler Version 5 User's Guide (1996) [pdf]

#16
Ah, I had TASM 5, boxed. Great memories. I actually remember reading the manual for fun. If I remember right there were two manuals in the box, this one and an assembly reference.

Scrolling through it just now, I now also remember "Ideal" mode, and how it was so much better than MASMs weird idiosyncrasies.

Re: Borland Turbo Assembler Version 5 User's Guide (1996) [pdf]

#19
post #4

Borland manuals were a pure delight.. as was the speed of Turbo Pascal compilation and the elegance of their text mode windowing object system. I remember scouring all the possible BBS dialup file servers to find a compiler for my first 8086 machine .. I knew there had to be something better than GW Basic .. I could not find a compiler for free, but did happen up on A86 assembler, so got an intro to how the machine r…

I was 14 years old, only ever programmed in Commodore Basic by typing in programs from the manual (in German) without understanding them, didn't understood English much.

I got pirated Turbo Pascal 7 and Turbo Basic with included manuals and I've learned programming from them (in a foreign language, with no internet).

That's how good they were.

Re: Borland Turbo Assembler Version 5 User's Guide (1996) [pdf]

#20
post #10

http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/borland/tur... Turbo C 2.0 user manual from the same site - it is just a gold mine.

I don't understand - the debugger in Turbo C was such a delight and inspecting structs, linked lists etc was so easy and somehow fit nicely on these old screens.

In VS today everything feels so cumbersome and convoluted I almost never bother witht the debugger, and instead just look at stack traces instead.

Post reply on HN