Turbo Basic

TurboBasic was a version of BASIC for DoS some years ago and part of a very popular Turbo series edited by Borland (Turbo C, TurboPascal, Turbo Prolog etc).

When it was dropped by the original owners, another group took it over and used it as the basis for PowerBasic?. They made the original TurboBasic more compatible with QuickBasic but still included some legacy support for the original language.

It appears that much of the TurboBasic code was used in another PowerBasic product called FirstBasic?, the syntax of FirstBasic? does not follow QuickBasic in several regards.

This software is from the 1987-1988 period and features the Borland "black screen" similar toTurbo Pascal 4.0, Turbo C 1.0/1.5, and Turbo Prolog 1.1. Borland did not adopt its trademark "blue screen" integrated development environment until the 1989 period when Turbo C 2.0, Turbo C++ 1.1, etc. were released. By this time, Turbo Basic and Turbo Prolog were no longer being sold. Borland's Turbo Basic contains extensions to classical Basic (while not breaking compatibility). One of those are drawing API, and mouse access. Unlike most BASIC implementations of this period, Turbo Basic was a full compiler which generated native code for MS-DOS. Other implementations were either interpreters, or relied heavily on a runtime library. The integrated development environment could run a BASIC program internally for traditional BASIC debugging (see sample below), or generate an MS-DOS stand-alone executable file that could be run on other systems without the Turbo Basic product or runtime libraries.

CategoryProgrammingLanguage