> I started developing for Windows 3.0 using Borland tools and never paid more than 100 euro (when converted for today's money) with their Turbo C++ and Pascal compilers, ...
> I guess we have different points of view what being developer friendly actually means.
We may be in more agreement than you suspect, for what it's worth - I think it's mainly a matter of timing. The development community, including Borland, pivoted from OS/2 to Windows right around the 1990 release of 3.0. That forced Microsoft to open up a lot of the tooling required to compile Windows binaries. (IIRC, the effort was something like Open Tools, and there was also ToolHelp, which was Microsoft's way of opening up Win16 debugger support that had been previously proprietary.) This was a big part of the reason that companies like Borland could ship products that let you code for Windows without an SDK.
Prior to that point... 1985-1989/90, the situation was a lot more closed and tools like the SDK were extra cost add ons.
Borland just made one attempt at OS/2, and it wasn't as good as Visual Age for C++ and CSet++. There was hardly anything to pivot from.
As for Windows 1.0 - 2.0, which is the time frame you are talking about, Windows did not matter at all. We only cared about MS-DOS and compatibles.
And on MS-DOS, their Pascal and C offerings were quite lousy when compared with the competition, so we were gladly giving money to TMT, Borland, Nanuteck, Gardens Point, Watcom.
They were also ironically the last C compiler vendor for MS-DOS to add support for C++, the very last edition of their compiler for MS-DOS, Microsoft C/C++ v7.
And in what concerns freely available, MS-DOS did not had any SDK, so yeah we had to pay for a book with the BIOS and Int 21h documentation, like PC Systems Internals.
> I guess we have different points of view what being developer friendly actually means.
We may be in more agreement than you suspect, for what it's worth - I think it's mainly a matter of timing. The development community, including Borland, pivoted from OS/2 to Windows right around the 1990 release of 3.0. That forced Microsoft to open up a lot of the tooling required to compile Windows binaries. (IIRC, the effort was something like Open Tools, and there was also ToolHelp, which was Microsoft's way of opening up Win16 debugger support that had been previously proprietary.) This was a big part of the reason that companies like Borland could ship products that let you code for Windows without an SDK.
Prior to that point... 1985-1989/90, the situation was a lot more closed and tools like the SDK were extra cost add ons.