Borland Brings back the Turbo Name
There is news from our old friends at Borland. It looks like they are bringing back the Turbo name.
There are many thousands of programmers who remember the great Turbo Pascal and Turbo C products from Borland. Well, now they are bringing the Turbo name back. There is a new web site called Turbo Explorer dot com that gives you the basic facts about the new line of inexpensive developer products. Among the offerings are a Turbo Delphi and Turbo C++.
These products are all being released by the Developer Tools Group that Borland has been in the process of spinning off for the last few months. If I properly understand the mindset of the Borland team, their goal is to try to demonstrate that the new tools group, when it is fully independent of Borland, will return to the developer centered focus that gave the company such a highly respected name back in 1980s and 90s.
The Turbo Explorer web site is full of graphics from the old Turbo Pascal and Turbo C products. A movie linked to from the site even brings in the cartoon characters that Borland used in some of its old advertising campaigns. Mock ups for the product boxes shown on the site use the same branding that was found on the old Turbo Pascal books and boxes released in the 1990s.
Though many of the developers who created those wonderful old Turbo Pascal and Turbo C products now work at Microsoft, there is still a scattering of the old guard working at Borland. Some of their names crop up in the new Turbo product press releases. Here’s wishing them the best of luck in their new venture.
