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0 pointsMinor49er5y ago0 comments

It definitely was super cool. The windows had types, could be resized, had titles, dropdown menus, and form controls. The editor had syntax highlighting. And most importantly (at least for me at the time), there was a language reference included with the help system which had hyperlinking, so you could click through pages about the supported syntax and various topics, gleaning a wealth of information. All on DOS!

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makapuf5y ago· 2 in thread

Hypertext integrated help has been available earlier than turbo vision even. It has been available from turbo pascal 3 at least. For a young like me who ... copied it on two disks, it was awesome what you could learn.

badsectoracula5y ago

Turbo Pascal 3 didn't have integrated help (hypertext or not), it was introduced in Turbo Pascal 4 (which itself was AFAIK in general a big rewrite of the compiler and IDE).

Though the integrated help really improved with version 6 (when Turbo Vision was also introduced) since you could move a cursor freely inside the help window as if it was an editor, select and copy text, the help text was much more detailed and more organized and every function/procedure also had a small example showing its use (version 5.5 also had examples but the overall help was much more terse).

makapuf5y ago

Ah, maybe version 4. 5.5 was my favourite with objects. Later ones with turbo vision swapped on my 640k 8086.

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