Turbo Basic was originally created by Robert "Bob" Zale (1945–2012) and bought from him by Borland.

[2][3][4] PowerBASIC went on to develop BASIC compilers for Windows, first PBWIN — their flagship product — and then PBCC, described below.

His wife, Vivian Zale, posted on 8 March 2014 to the PowerBASIC forums a statement that the company would continue in operation.

[5] On May 10, 2015, Vivian Zale announced that work was continuing on new versions of PowerBASIC compilers.

PBDOS includes an integrated development environment (IDE) and supports DOS 3.30 and all later versions.

No knowledge of Windows programming is required to create character mode or graphical applications with this compiler.

You can create an application's graphical user interface using the Windows API, or by using the built-in DDT language extensions.

PowerBASIC renamed PBWin v9.07 and PB/CC v5.07 as "Classic PBWin" and "Classic PB/CC", respectively, and on November 1, 2016, offered them for a short time through their online store as free, no-nag, trial versions along with PBForms v1.0 (PowerBASIC Forms).

[11] PowerBASIC Forms, available for purchase separately, is a graphical user interface design tool add-on for PBWin.

It automatically produces source code using the DDT language extension that creates forms using the Windows graphical user interface.

The PowerBASIC COM Browser, which comes with PBWin, is an application that exposes the interfaces, methods, and properties of COM objects, as described by type-library files.

[12] PowerBASIC is a native-code BASIC compiler whose reported merits are simplicity of use and speed compared to other languages.

The Windows compilers (PBWin & PBCC) support almost all of the x86 instruction set, including FPU, SIMD, and MMX, the main exceptions being a few which are useful mostly to systems programmers.

The use of Waitkey$ in this example prevents the console window from automatically closing until the operator sees the displayed text.

These structured control statements eliminate many instances that would require the use of GOTO and labels: PBWin and PBCC support object-oriented programming in the form of COM classes, however the compilers do not force you to use OOP, it is merely an option.

A single BASIC statement will create a GRAPHIC WINDOW and specify its size, position and title.

Contrast this with the GDI API approach, where the Device Context handle is required for every drawing operation.

When GRAPHIC targets are attached, a REDRAW option can be specified which buffers the results of drawing operations until they are specifically requested.

[18] On 8 July 2012 the forum had 5,623 members (only a fraction of them still active) and contained 50,093 threads comprising 408,642 posts since August 26, 1998.