Your perspective on this may be distorted due to your personal involvement. Do y...

WalterBright · 2026-06-05T18:05:59 1780682759

> Do you believe MSVC++ or Turbo C++ would still have existed without Zortech C++ arriving first?

Nope. As I mentioned, Borland was working on their own OOP C language. ZTC++'s success caused them to abandon it and do Turbo C++. I know this because of my conversations with Eugene Wang. And Turbo C++'s success caused Microsoft to do MSVC++, which was quite late to the game.

Before C++, the newsgroup traffic on C++ and ObjC was about the same. The C++ traffic took off after ZTC++ was released.

WalterBright · 2026-06-05T18:42:00 1780684920

You can verify some of this by:

1. looking at newsgroup programming language traffic over time

2. looking at the release dates of Zortech C++, Turbo C++, and MSVC++

3. looking at the programming magazines of the time and what language/compiler they used

4. looking at the programming magazines at the time and seeing they were all about programming on the PC, not mainframes, and not Unix.