I still have the Turbo Debugger 2.0 manual in my bookshelf...
Borland Turbo Assembler Version 5 User's Guide (1996) [pdf]
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Re: Borland Turbo Assembler Version 5 User's Guide (1996) [pdf]
#32As a kid who was left alone with a computer for way too long back in the early 90s, I remember learning English from Civilopedia and playing around with Borland turbo pascal 7. TP manual had an example where they built polynomials using linked lists. That was the first time I realized that you could store pointers to other regions of memory which store pointers. Nobody around me had any clue why I was so happy.
Re: Borland Turbo Assembler Version 5 User's Guide (1996) [pdf]
#33Borland 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 don't understand why the TUI of old text-mode IDE's (from Microsoft as well as Borland) has yet to be replicated in modern terminal environments. You can kinda get a menubar in Emacs but it's quite clunky, and grabbing mouse input in the terminal requires a separate incantation. And even Emacs doesn't allow for floating windows/dialogs, nor does it show text-mode scrollbars or windowing widgets. You'd think that ma…
I think it is partly fashion (little UI is more "hackerish" after all) and partly lack of exposure (a lot of programmers nowadays who have worked on TUI applications might have little to no exposure to DOS programs of yesteryear).
It is technically possible though, as an example here is Free Pascal's text-mode IDE[0] running inside an xterm window under Linux. The IDE uses Free Vision[1], a TUI framework originally based on Borland's Turbo Vision, that is nowadays part of Free Pascal itself (though the framework uses the TP7-style "object" types for OOP instead of the Delphi-style "class" types).
Re: Borland Turbo Assembler Version 5 User's Guide (1996) [pdf]
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand why the TUI of old text-mode IDE's (from Microsoft as well as Borland) has yet to be replicated in modern terminal environments. You can kinda get a menubar in Emacs but it's quite clunky, and grabbing mouse input in the terminal requires a separate incantation. And even Emacs doesn't allow for floating windows/dialogs, nor does it show text-mode scrollbars or windowing widgets. You'd think that ma…
I think it is partly fashion (little UI is more "hackerish" after all) and partly lack of exposure (a lot of programmers nowadays who have worked on TUI applications might have little to no exposure to DOS programs of yesteryear). It is technically possible though, as an example here is Free Pascal's text-mode IDE[0] running inside an xterm window under Linux. The IDE uses Free Vision[1], a TUI framework originally b…
Yeah but FPIDE is the exception that proves the rule. Why can't we have a VSCode work-alike in text mode, with LSP, tree-sitter and DAP support? That stuff is even getting added to Emacs these days, so it has a proper free-software pedigree even though it comes from M$.
Re: Borland Turbo Assembler Version 5 User's Guide (1996) [pdf]
#35Borland 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 don't understand why the TUI of old text-mode IDE's (from Microsoft as well as Borland) has yet to be replicated in modern terminal environments. You can kinda get a menubar in Emacs but it's quite clunky, and grabbing mouse input in the terminal requires a separate incantation. And even Emacs doesn't allow for floating windows/dialogs, nor does it show text-mode scrollbars or windowing widgets. You'd think that ma…
> And even Emacs doesn't allow for floating windows/dialogs, nor does it show text-mode scrollbars or windowing widgets.
However, the floating window had its downsides. They hid what was behind the window and modals, so if you started a dialog box and changed your mind about the text behind it, you have to close the dialog box, change the text and restart your dialog box.
Emacs and Vim avoid these problems by turning everything into a buffer. So all of your interactions with the editor are done through buffers which can be opened side by side.
Re: Borland Turbo Assembler Version 5 User's Guide (1996) [pdf]
#36I still use Turbo Basic.
Re: Borland Turbo Assembler Version 5 User's Guide (1996) [pdf]
#37Borland 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 don't understand why the TUI of old text-mode IDE's (from Microsoft as well as Borland) has yet to be replicated in modern terminal environments. You can kinda get a menubar in Emacs but it's quite clunky, and grabbing mouse input in the terminal requires a separate incantation. And even Emacs doesn't allow for floating windows/dialogs, nor does it show text-mode scrollbars or windowing widgets. You'd think that ma…
There are attempts at similar things - https://www.willmcgugan.com/tag/textual/
Re: Borland Turbo Assembler Version 5 User's Guide (1996) [pdf]
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand why the TUI of old text-mode IDE's (from Microsoft as well as Borland) has yet to be replicated in modern terminal environments. You can kinda get a menubar in Emacs but it's quite clunky, and grabbing mouse input in the terminal requires a separate incantation. And even Emacs doesn't allow for floating windows/dialogs, nor does it show text-mode scrollbars or windowing widgets. You'd think that ma…
The IBM PC text mode buffer was mapped into memory, so you could quickly update any part of the screen and easily do things like double-buffering (for rock-solid screen updates), composing the screen out of floating windows held in separate memory buffers, etc. The Unix terminal is derived from line printers (teletype), a fundamentally different kind of TUI. I don’t know how much this realistically affects today’s te…
This is exactly correct.
As far as affecting the state of TUI/CLI programs today, it becomes part of the culture as well as part of the overall look and feel of the system.
Yet, there are programs that break from convention: JOE, Dit, irssi, etc.
Re: Borland Turbo Assembler Version 5 User's Guide (1996) [pdf]
#39From the era when software development still had documentation, and technical writers.
Re: Borland Turbo Assembler Version 5 User's Guide (1996) [pdf]
#40Borland 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.
Similar story but I bought the original box of TP7 in 1993. The manuals structured in an exemplary way with so many technical details and even with part of the Turbo Vision source code. It made me a better programmer for sure. I even sent them a registration card. I still have the confirmation letter from my product registration giving me access to the support hotline and BBS.