Exploring A Bunch of Retro Programming Tools (Mailcall #1)

Since starting this channel, I've received some donations, some very generous viewers have made donations to the channel, including a full set of Borland C++ 2.0 floppy disks, the Borland Brief text editor, a literal copy of DESQView, and a sealed in box copy of Visual C# 2003. I've been figuring out how to do a mailcall properly, so here's my first attempt at doing so.

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Borland Brief is a full screen text editor which was very popular in the late 80s and early 90s as a macro based system. While I know that Brief was indeed sold as an independent package, I don't know if it was included in Borland C++ of this era.

As for Borland C++, this version is for both DOS and Windows. Interestingly, its from 1991, and targets Windows 3.0, and not the much more common 3.1. As a result of it's early status, it doesn't include the famous Borland OWL (Object Windows Library), and while there's a specific version of Turbo Debugger for Windows, it obviously doesn't work off Windows 95.

DESQView on other hand was one of the earlist, and most popular multitasking environments for DOS, and competed with Windows and DR-DOS in this area. Made by the world famous Quarterdeck Software, DESQView became less and less relevant as Quarterdeck lost ground to Windows, and eventually disappeared. I'd love to find a copy of DESQView/X and explore full X11 capability under DOS.

Finally, rounding out the set is a boxed copy of Visual C# 2003. Here we talk a bit about Microsoft's .NET environment, the broader Visual Studio .NET, and how this version was a significant departure from the "classic" Studio versions of the past, and how it was the start of the Shell environment that followed.

After compiling some Hello World programs, we took the board for a quick spin to modern Windows 10 to see if we have working backwards compatibility:

Interesting Timestamps:

Music provided under license by Epidemic Sound (https://www.epidemicsound.com/) with the following tracks in order:

#vintagecomputing #retrodevelopment #borland #mailcall #desqview