Just read on Koen’s blog that the Turbo products line will be revived. Great stuff !

I started my serious programming works on Turbo Pascal around 1990. It’s clear that the Turbo products was a breakthrough because of the following reasons :

1. With the simple IDE (Integrated Development Environment), Borland significantly lowered the barrier of entry to programming. People can start to program and see results in very little time.
2. Excellent documentations – it’s not easy to find product documentations that’s of equal quality of Borland’s. For example; a Turbo product manual also includes a programming tutorial, aiming at complete newbies. So you don’t need to buy additional “Idiot’s Guide To ..” book – Turbo product already got you covered. Before O’Reilly’s book series, there were Borland products and its excellent user manuals.
3. Cheap – it was priced within a lot of people’s reach.
4. Because of the reasons above, Borland’s Turbo series has helped Microsoft to dominate the PC platform, even though they’ll hate to admit it. Among the reasons of the OS/2’s failure (much to my grief) was lack of a big enough developer community (a vital ingredient to grow any platform).

Too bad there’s no Linux version yet, I think that would really help to entice more newbies to Linux programming. Oh well, later perhaps.

In the mean time, kudos to everyone involved.