Turbo Vision
Developer(s) | Borland |
---|---|
Initial release | 1990 |
Written in | |
Operating system | MS-DOS |
Platform | PC |
Type | Widget toolkit |
License | Public domain software[1][2] |
Website |
tvision |
Turbo Vision is a DOS-based character-mode text user interface (TUI) framework developed around 1990 by Borland for Pascal, and C++. Later it was deprecated in favor of Object Windows Library for the then-increasingly important Win16 API.
The Turbo Vision framework was included with Borland Pascal, Turbo Pascal, and Borland C++. It was used by Borland itself to write the integrated development environments (IDE) for these programming languages. By default, Turbo Vision applications replicate the look and feel of these IDEs. Key parts of the Turbo Vision library replicate the functionality of standard components in Microsoft Windows, for example edit controls, list boxes, check boxes, radio buttons and menus, all of which have built-in mouse support.
Around 1997, the C++ version, including source code, was released by Borland into the public domain[1][2] and is currently being ported and developed by an open-source community on sourceforge under the GPL license.[3] An older update of the Borland code by Sergio Sigala is available under the BSD license.
The Pascal version, which was distributed alongside Borland Pascal 7 on a "bonus" disk, was never released under a free software license, so the Free Pascal project recreated its own version by backporting a clone made by Leon de Boer that ran in graphical mode back to textmode. The result is called Free Vision.[4] Over the years this codebase has grown stable on nearly all operating systems and architectures that FPC supports. The textmode IDE is very close to the original TP environment, with built-in compiler and IDE much closer than e.g. RHIDE, and supporting functionality like code folding.
See also
References
- 1 2 Tvision "What about copyrights? [...] According to a FAQ entry in the Borland's site (was in http://www.inprise.com/devsupport/bcppbuilder/faq/QNA906.html when I saw it) the code is public domain. I also asked in the Borland's newsgroup and the TeamB people (not official people but they are who give technical support in the net) said me the FAQ was right."
- 1 2 Turbo Vision - by Borland Developer Support Staff on community.borland.com/ "Question: Where can I find the public domain version of Turbo Vision? Answer: It can be found at ftp.inprise.com/pub/borlandcpp/devsupport/archive/turbovision/" (1998, archived)
- ↑ tvision.sf.net on sf.net
- ↑ Free Vision on freepascal.org
External links
- Free Vision “Free Pascal’s Turbo Vision”
- TVision website
- "Sigala's version"
- Turbo Vision resources