Today, in a “blast from the past”, I leave you to admire this screenshot of what used to be the Turbo C/C++ IDE:

This was a great IDE, emulating a windowed environment in text mode with mouse support and everything. It had syntax coloring, integrated function documentation, and its own debugger.

The entire Borland suite, from the early Turbo Pascal, had always been a pleasure to use. Turbo Pascal was blazingly fast and a great way to get started with programming. I learned Pascal on the UCSD Pascal compiler on Apple //c, then moved to Turbo Pascal and that was a dramatic improvement. Then later to Turbo C and Turbo C++.

The other thing I used a lot back then was the Watcom C++ compiler. This was way before the first “C++98” standard was a thing. Each vendor had their own magic sauce of C++ back then.