Borland

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

~ the eulogy ~

turbo pascal was the language they handed you in computer engineering classes in the early 2000s, even after c plus plus had already taken over for everything else. borland's name sat at the top of the editor every time you compiled a homework assignment. the company itself was already in slow decline by then, but its tools still ran on every blue-screen dos box and every early windows machine i sat in front of.

borland was founded in 1983 in scotts valley, california, by philippe kahn together with three danish co-founders (niels jensen, ole henriksen, mogens glad). the company name came from an early irish customer. turbo pascal launched in november 1983 at $39.95, undercutting microsoft pascal by an order of magnitude. anders hejlsberg wrote the original compiler. he would later leave for microsoft and create c sharp and the dot net runtime, which is one of the cleaner careers in commercial language design.

through the eighties borland was the developer-tools peer to microsoft in the so-called big four of pc software. ashton-tate sat in the database tier and lotus development held the spreadsheet seat. then in 1991 borland paid $440 million for ashton-tate and inherited the dbase iv disaster, which absorbed engineering resources for years.

delphi shipped in 1995. it pulled the object pascal language into a rapid application development environment that became the de facto windows business-app stack for a decade, especially in eastern europe and turkey. accounting programs and clinic databases written in ankara from roughly 1996 to 2008 had a non-trivial chance of being a delphi binary underneath. the same went for small-shop point-of-sale terminals.

borland renamed itself inprise in april 1998 in an enterprise pivot that nobody asked for. the rename failed to land and the company reverted to borland software corporation in january 2001. micro focus then bought what remained for around $75 million in july 2009. the brand was retired over the next few years.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

turbo pascal was the product that made borland real. it compiled fast and shipped on a single floppy at a fraction of microsoft pascal's price. the integrated environment was a small miracle for the time. you edited code, hit a key, and the compiled program ran. no makefiles, no separate linker passes you had to remember. by the late eighties the turbo line had expanded into c, c plus plus, and other compilers under the same wrapper. anders hejlsberg's compiler tech kept the cycle times absurdly short on the same xt and at hardware microsoft tools were choking on.

~ the unraveling ~

the 1991 ashton-tate acquisition was the first real wound. borland paid 440 million dollars for the dbase parent at the moment dbase iv was shipping with serious bugs and microsoft access was about to launch into the same market. the database business absorbed engineering resources for years and never paid back.

microsoft also began competing harder on developer tools through the nineties. visual basic took the small-business windows-app space that delphi was supposed to own, and visual studio professional moved the c plus plus tier away from borland c plus plus. by 1995 philippe kahn was out, and the company began the long sequence of layoffs and renames that ran until the micro focus sale.

~ the next chapter ~

the brand is dead but the products outlived it in pieces. delphi and c plus plus builder were spun out to embarcadero technologies in 2008 and still ship today as paid ides. anders hejlsberg's c sharp work at microsoft is one of borland's lineage outputs. a generation of programmers, especially in turkey and the rest of eastern europe, learned what an ide felt like by sitting in front of turbo pascal 7 on a vga screen.

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