By David Gewirtz
How many of you remember the early Borland International? Today, it's known as Inprise Corporation. Inprise is now in the enterprise integration business, although the company still uses the Borland name with some of its development tools.
But back in the early 80's, Borland sold programming tools and utilities primarily to hobbiest users. Even if you weren't an active PC user back in 1984 (and some of you were probably just about 10 years old), you might have heard of the signature Borland products Turbo Pascal and Sidekick. Back then, Turbo Pascal was a very cool development tool. It cost about fifty bucks, ran kinda slowly compared to "real" compiled code, but made it possible to build some real software and was fun to use at the same time.
Sidekick was an organizer. It was one of the first TSR programs. TSR means Terminate and Stay Resident, back-then geek-speak for a pop-up application. The program would patch DOS, waiting for a particular key sequence. When the patch saw that key sequence, it would run the Sidekick code. If my memory holds, Sidekick had a calendar, a note pad, a to-do list and other typical organizer goodies.
You gotta remember than when we're talking about the early 80's, we're talking about DOS. Pure, unadulterated, A-prompt-using, not-a-bitmap-in-sight DOS. To those of you used to pull-down menus and Start buttons, the idea of remembering commands and typing them in may seem arcane and archaic. But the reality was that computers were pretty usable back then even without graphical user interfaces. The early DOS machines used up to 640K RAM -- not megabytes (millions of bytes), but kilobytes (thousands of bytes). In fact, the total RAM of those early DOS machines was considerably less than what's on one of the early Palm devices and yet, you could use a fully functional word processor or C compiler in that space. Amazingly, even prior to the DOS era, you could use fine word processors in 64K on old 8-bit CP/M machines. The fundamental value formula doesn't change, but the user interface is considerably more involved.
Programming tools on the PC back then were usable, but not fun. You'd use a text editor to edit your code, and a command line, UNIX-like interface to compile it. Turbo Pascal eliminated much of that by combining editing, debugging, and testing into one screen-based (but not graphical!) user interface.
