The BTC (block turbo code) was introduced at Globecom in 1994. Since then, there have been many improvements which are disseminated in different papers. This paper aims at giving a global view of the BTC technology ten years after its introduction. After recalling the major concepts involved in BTC, we provide a global view of the implementation issues and we present a very high data rate turbo decoder. Next we consider additional features of BTC such as the stop criterion, flexibility of the code parameters and also performance on binary symmetric and erasure channels. Finally, recent results regarding Reed-Solomon BTC are presented and compared to BCH-BTC.