Borland C++

» see borland.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Turkish engineering faculties were still teaching people to compile in a Borland box well into the 2000s, years after Borland had stopped selling the thing. That is how I met it. Not as a product anyone in my life had bought, but as a lab machine somebody had set up once and never touched again, the same blue screen with the same yellow menu bar, F9 to make and Ctrl+F9 to run. The company had moved on to something else entirely and nobody in the room cared.

Borland C++ proper started at version 2.0 in 1991 for MS-DOS, with Windows support arriving in 3.0 later that year. It was the professional tier above Turbo C++, which was the cheap consumer line, and the two shared an ancestry going back to Turbo C in 1987. The pitch was the same one Borland had been making since Turbo Pascal: a compiler and a debugger living inside the editor, so you did not have to assemble a toolchain out of parts before writing a line of code.

Version 3.1 in 1992 is the one people remember, largely because it added OWL, the Object Windows Library, which made writing a Windows program something a single person could reasonably attempt. Version 4.5 followed for Windows 3.x. Version 5.0 arrived in March 1996 with Java support and Windows 95 compatibility, and 5.02 in April 1997 closed the line.

There was one coda. In February 2000 Borland released version 5.5 as a free command line compiler with no IDE at all, which meant an entire wave of students and hobbyists who never paid for anything got a legitimate, standards-decent C++ compiler for Windows at exactly the moment they needed one.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what came after ~

C++Builder took over in 1997, and its logic was straightforward: Delphi had shown that a visual form designer sitting on top of a real native compiler sold extremely well, so do that again in C++. It worked commercially. It also meant the plain compiler product stopped existing, folded into a bigger and heavier IDE that wanted you to build applications a particular way.

Meanwhile Microsoft was winning the other end. Visual C++ came with MFC and with whatever Microsoft had decided Windows was going to be next year. Borland had spent a decade being better and cheaper than Microsoft's developer tools, and that stopped being a viable position once Microsoft decided to take developer tools seriously.

~ the long tail ~

The strange afterlife is that Borland C++ 3.1 kept running long after any reason for it to. Curricula were written around it and course exercises assumed it, and the DOS binary would still start inside a Windows console years later. Entire cohorts of engineers whose careers started in the 2000s wrote their first C++ inside an interface built for a 1992 machine and learned a graphics library that never worked anywhere except DOS.

It made those people good at something, though. When your compiler predates your operating system by a decade you learn very quickly what belongs to the language and what belongs to the vendor, and that separation is worth more than whatever the current IDE was going to teach instead.

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