README

TurboPower B-Tree Filer v5.41

22 years ago, TurboPower Software closed their doors as a retail software company and released all of their development libraries the for Borland[1]/CodeGear/Embarcadero Delphi compiler. These items were released under a Mozilla 1.1 license.

Here's their original announcement: http://www.turbopower.com/

Unfortunately, nobody seems to have been able to get their attention about making their fantastic MS-DOS libraries for Turbo Pascal available online.

Their website clearly states, "TurboPower libraries released as open source". Their MS-DOS libraries would appear to fall under that statement. Maybe they figured, "Hey, it's 2003. Nobody's going to be interested in this ancient DOS stuff!"

Well dammit, I'm interested! I'm sure I'm not the only one.

The original product description for B-Tree Filer can be found here.

I owned a copy of B-Tree Filer that I used back in the mid 90's and after chasing down some patch updates, this repository is the result. At some point, I'll be adding photos and binary images of my original diskettes.

While setting up this repository, I found that version 5.55 of B-Tree Filer for DOS may have been the last version released for DOS. If you have that version, please reach out!

Building

B-Tree Filer can be built using Turbo Pascal versions 5.5 to 7.0, and Borland Pascal v7.0. In the case of Borland Pascal 7.0, units can be built for both real mode (TPU) and protected mode (TPP). The build process also requires Turbo Assembler v1.0 or greater, or Microsoft Assembler v4.0 or greater in order to assemble the .ASM files. You'll need to ensure that your build tools are in your DOS path.

The files SRC\BTDEFINE.INC and SRC\TPDEFINE.INC have settings that can be changed in order to affect how B-Tree Filer is built and functions. It would be worth your time to peruse that file - note that unless you know why you're going to change something, you probably should leave it the default.

There are two Makefiles for B-Tree Filer in the SRC directory. FILER.MAK is for the "single user" version of B-Tree Filer. NETFILER.MAK is for the network aware, multi-user version of B-Tree Filer.

The Makefiles will allow you to adjust a number of different things about how the units are built. I recommend going through it - the settings it uses are very well documented. Note that the Makefile uses the Borland Make syntax.

Change to the SRC directory and kick off the build with MAKE -FFILER or MAKE -FNETFILER. This will build all the units, all the object files and build most of the examples. Copy all the TPU and/or TPP unit files to some location that you can easily point the compiler's Unit Directory setting at. You're done!

Documentation

The help files in the HELP directory can be rebuilt using the MAKEHELP program in the TOOLS directory.

The manual for version 5.23 of B-Tree Filer is available here: https://archive.org/details/b-tree-filer-v-5.23

If you or someone you know has a more recent version of the B-Tree Filer manual, please reach out. I can non-destructively scan it at my expense and return it.

Hopefully more people than just me will find this repository useful.