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▲ JdeBP 2 hours ago

There's a lot more that can be said about this:

1. If you've ever heard of TurboVision, this UI is similar to it. But actual TurboVision as it was later to be found in Borland programs, and as even can be found in clones today, did not have this look and feel, which would have seemed a little clunky for a TUI by the end of the 1980s.

1. Notice that F1 is already help, but the other function keys do not follow the CUA pattern that was only actually formalized that same year.

1. Notice the differently coloured letters for the shortcut keys for menu entries, something that has largely vanished nowadays.

1. Notice how wasteful of 80×25 area some of the windows are. It was not long before everyone had shrunk the application menu down to 1 row. Conversely, though, look how colour is used to demarcate function key names, rather than using square brackets.

1. Scroll Lock is actually a major part of the user interface. A number of MC/PC/DR-DOS programs at the time gave a use to Scroll Lock. In Turbo BASIC, it switched (as it says in the screen shot) into and out of a mode where the arrow keys moved/resized things.

▲pjmlp 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Note that when Turbo BASIC came out, Turbo Pascal 6 was still a few years away.

This interface is magical when comparing with Turbo Pascal 3.3 and 4.0.

I don't recall any longer correctly, but I think Turbo Basic even supported dual monitor debugging sessions.

▲topham 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I know their Turbo C 2 tools did.

Miss those days. When I got a 386 and could use the turbo debugger to hack games. Pretty sweet. Just run the code; interrupt it near where it was asking for a word or number or clicking a symbol, then tweak a flag and let the game continue.

So often the final fix was to nop out an instruction that set a flag and just let it fall through.

Then there was the DSI team in Vancouver who encrypted their boot code...