Borland Turbo C

Borland Turbo C
Initial release1987; 32 years ago (1987)
Operating systemMicrosoft Windows, MS-DOS
LicenseProprietary software



Early history[edit]

In the early 1980s, Borland enjoyed considerable success with their Turbo Pascal product and it became a popular choice when developing applications for the PC. Borland followed up that success by releasing Turbo Basic, Turbo Prolog, and in 1987, Turbo C. Turbo C has similar properties to Turbo Pascal: an integrated development environment, a fast compiler (though not near the speed of Turbo Pascal)[1], a good editor, and a competitive price.

While Turbo Pascal was successful with hobbyists and schools as well as professional programmers, Turbo C competed with other professional programming tools, such as Microsoft C, Lattice C, and Watcom C.[citation needed]

Version history[edit]

Version 1.0 (May 13, 1987) offered the first integrated development environment for C on IBM PCs. Like many Borland products of the time, the software was bought from another company (in this case Wizard C by Bob Jervis[2]), and branded with the "Turbo" name. It ran in 384 kB of memory. It allowed inline assembly with full access to C symbolic names and structures, supported all memory models, and offered optimizations for speed, size, constant folding, and jump elimination.[3]


Version 2.0 (late 1988) featured the first "blue screen" version, which would be typical of all future Borland releases for MS-DOS. The American release did not have Turbo Assembler or a separate debugger. (These were sold separately as Turbo Assembler.) Turbo C, Asm, and Debugger were sold together as a suite. This seems to describe another release: Featured Turbo Debugger, Turbo Assembler, and an extensive graphics library. This version of Turbo C was also released (in Germany only) for the Atari ST; the program was not maintained by Borland, but sold and renamed PureC.

With the release of Turbo C++ 1.0 (in 1990), the two products were folded into one and the name "Turbo C" was discontinued. The C++ compiler was developed under contract by a company in San Diego, and was one of the first "true" compilers for C++ (until then, it was common to use pre-compilers that generated C code, ref. Cfront).

Freeware release[edit]

In 2006,[citation needed] Borland's successor, Embarcadero Technologies, re-released Turbo C and the MS-DOS versions of the Turbo C++ compilers as freeware.[4][5][6]


BYTE in 1989 listed Turbo C and Turbo Pascal as among the "Distinction" winners of the BYTE Awards. Citing their user interface and continued emphasis on speed, the magazine stated that "for rapid prototyping there's not much better".[7]

See also[edit]


  1. ^ Hague, James. "A Personal History of Compilation Speed, Part 2". Programming in the 21st Century. Retrieved 2016-06-05.
  2. ^ Borland Backgrounder, 2/8/99
  3. ^ "Computing Dictionary". Retrieved 2016-06-05.
  4. ^ Tim DelChiaro (2011-03-28). "Free Borland C++ 5.5 Compiler". Retrieved 2019-09-11.
  5. ^ David Intersimone (2000-02-15) [1989-05-11]. "Antique Software: Turbo C version 2.01". Retrieved 2019-09-11.
  6. ^ David Intersimone (2000-04-14) [1991-02-28]. "Antique Software: Turbo C++ version 1.01". Retrieved 2019-09-11.

External links[edit]