Borland International, Inc. Turbo BASIC started life as BASIC/Z and written by Robert "Bob" Zale. It was the first interactive compiler running on the CP/M operating system, but in 1987, Borland purchased it and published it for MS-DOS. It was sold only for a couple of years, before being discontinued, so Bob bought the rights back to continue it under the title Power BASIC.
Aside from being a compiler rather than just an interpreter, it also permitted much larger executable programs to be created. GWBASIC was limited to .BAS files of no larger than 64 KB. With Turbo BASIC you could create files of any size as long as it fit into available memory. One of the most popular features of Borland's compilers was that they featured an IDE, or Integrated Development Environment.
While in Borland's control, several versions were released. The first version was v1.0. For anyone who had already written BASIC programs in GWBASIC or QBASIC, you could load its .BAS files into Turbo BASIC and it would be around 90% compatible. Later that same year, Borland released version 1.1 - believed to simply be a bug-fix release. In 1987 Borland released a series of complementary "Turbo Toolboxes" that would work with Turbo BASIC, including Database, Editor, and Telecom Toolboxes, each available for $99.95.
Borland International were initially headquartered in Scotts Valley, CA. The 7-building campus was built at the height of Borland's success in 1993, comprising 444,000 square feet of office space. It cost nearly $120M to build for its 1,200 employees.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing