Borland Being Purchased By Micro Focus 351
An anonymous reader tips news that Micro Focus is in the process of buying Borland Software for $75 million. They also picked up Compuware's application testing and automated software quality business. Quoting ZDNet:
"The boards of both companies agreed to the deal, which is expected to complete around mid-2009. ... In 2008, Texas-based Borland made a pre-tax loss of $204m, almost four times the size of the previous year's loss. It had revenues of $172m, part of a consistent downward trend since at least 2004. ... Borland was one of the oldest software companies in the PC software business, having been founded in 1981. Its most successful era was in the late 1980s via massive sales of Sidekick, a DOS-based terminate-and-stay-resident personal productivity application, and development tool Turbo Pascal, which challenged Microsoft's dominance in the application-development market."
TSR (Score:5, Informative)
Sidekick, a DOS-based terminate-and-stay-resident personal productivity application
Aaah good old terminate-and-stay-resident programs, from the heydays of non-multitasking OSs. Anyone else remember Int 27h [nvg.org] and the magic of hooking a subroutine to make it appear like your OS was actually multitasking? Hmph...kids these days..
Re:Who is Micro Focus? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, Micro Focus made a great deal of cash in the nineties by providing COBOL development on the PC. COBOL programmers who were maintaining applications on a mainframe were no longer tied to an 8-color terminal connected at 9600 baud, or by using a terminal-emulation program that was just as bad. Compuware also put out a number of mainframe tools that were heavily used. I wonder if Micro Focus got those as well?
Re:How many more (Score:5, Informative)
Being a Delphi programmer I noticed this news and thought wtf, but it must be noted that Delphi along other programming stuff was moved under CodeGear a few years ago and wasnt included in the purchase.
Still, I have high respect for Borland and the fact they provided early Delphi's for free on my teenage years when noone else did. I still enjoy Delphi as the most rapid programming tool, because it nicely integrates easy of GUI design but still powerful and fast code.
Borland raided by Microsuck... (Score:5, Informative)
In the end, Microsoft strategy of simply throwing obscene salaries at the Borland talent ultimately worked. It was systematic, it was effective.
Now go suck on Visual Studio.
Re:C++ Builder is the best C++ IDE for RAD, by far (Score:3, Informative)
C++ Builder and Delphi were sold off some time ago (to Embarcadero in 2008, according to wikipedia [wikipedia.org]), so I'm not sure what Borland actually does these days, but it should have no effect on any of the CodeGear stuff. I still use Delphi, it's a great IDE, but not as nice a language as c# imho, maybe there'll be a C# Builder in RAD studio at some point.
Re:Borland Turbo Assembler (Score:5, Informative)
Turbo C++ came years after Borland's original product: Turbo Pascal.
I started with Turbo Pascal with version 1.0. At the time, it was a revelation because it cost $49.00 in the days when PC development tools typically cost many hundreds of dollars, and because of its speed. It could compile a several thousand line Pascal program in just a few seconds. Other compilers of the time, such as Microsoft Pascal, took many minutes to compile the same code. It was limited, however, to 64K of code because the compiler created .COM files.
The compiler was so fast that Turbo Pascal was the rapid development tool of the 1980s on the PC. Nothing else could approach its speed.
While Phillipe Khan always maintained that he was the developer of the Turbo Pascal code, it was actually Anders Hejlsberg, the architect of C#, that actually wrote the code.
Re:C++ Builder is the best C++ IDE for RAD, by far (Score:4, Informative)
Only with .NET has Microsoft finally caught up with RAD form design. .NET is over 7 years old now... You might as well be railing against Windows 98.
Re:C++ Builder is the best C++ IDE for RAD, by far (Score:3, Informative)
All the developer tools were shipped off to CodeGear a few years ago. They are now owned by Embarcadero who are starting to invest more heavily in R&D. Delphi and C++ Builder 2009 are a vast improvement on the previous offerings.
Embarcadero already has the good stuff. (Score:5, Informative)
All the people remembering Borland's language wars with Microsoft, and came up on the other side, should know that all of those tools were sold to Embarcadero some time ago. The Borland that we knew has already been gone for quite some time. Turbo C++, C++ Builder, Turbo Pascal, JBuilder, etc, all live on at Embarcadero. In fact, I think Embarcadero even got the Borland database...
Re:Turbo C (Score:2, Informative)
Anders Hejlsberg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg) was the principal author of Turbo Pascal, Delphi and VCL component framework that was lured away by Microsoft and later played significant role in creating C#, J++ and .NET framework. Anyone that knows Delphi must have realized that C#/.NET is a mix of Java and Delphi (delegates, switch statement, .NET classes...) and this was the blow that really started the decline of Borland (of course, Eclipse was another disaster for them).
Re:How many more (Score:5, Informative)
BTW Delphi 2009 supports C# style generics, anonymous methods, inferred typing and deferred execution all in native code w/o .NET
Delphi is still very much a viable platform for new software!
Re:Who is Micro Focus? (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, you didn't learn development during the 90s. All COBOL, all Micro Focus.
You're right, I learned it in the 80s with AppleBASIC, FORTRAN and Turbo Pascal. COBOL smelled funny even then.
This is not Borland (Score:5, Informative)
I worked in Borland, when it was indeed Borland. Great company, you could not find another place with so many fine minds.
What is called Borland today is not the company that people knew. The management stole the name, connected it with mindless, buzzword-rich nonsense and moved the headquesters from Scotts Valley to Texas. They were selling nothing and that's what MicroFocus is buying: nothing.
The core of Borland's business, compilers and IDEs was spun off as CodeGear, recently purchased by Embarcadero Software. CodeGear is still located in Scotts Valley with many of the original developers in the group. Great people with a passion for tool development.
It's not a coincidence that Borland, the travesty, has been losing money at incredible speed after CodeGear was gone. The only part of the business that made sense, that generated revenues, was let go by a management simply unable to understand what a compiler is.
That the name Borland, which was synonym of innovation and "barbarian" spirit, is now associated with the leading name in a technology that was an embarrassment in the 80s, COBOL, is a shame that makes me cringe to no end.
Remember, this is not Borland, the real Borland, the one that brought us such gems as Turbo Pascal, C++ builder, Paradox, JBuilder etc, and that in general taught Microsoft how to write IDEs, is called CodeGear.
The company mentioned in this article, is a travesty and a sham.
Re:You are Micro Focus (Score:2, Informative)
Assuming that Borland still does IDEs and compilers (weren't they trying to spin off that business?)
Yes they did, all of their programming stuff was moved under CodeGear a few years ago, and those werent included in this purchase.
The Borland Museum (Score:5, Informative)
The Borland Museum [embarcadero.com] has the old Turbo series of Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, and Turbo C++ for MS-DOS downloadable for free.
Turbo Pascal and Delphi got replaced by Free Pascal [freepascal.org], and Turbo C++ got replaced with GNU C++ and MinGW C++ [mingw.org] for Windows which are open source alternatives to them. Which I think is why the Borland Museum got opened and why the command line version of Borland C++ was given away for free.
While people were waiting for the Borland Museum to release Delphi 1.0 the Lazarus Project [freepascal.org] was developed based on Free Pascal to replace Delphi.
Re:TSR (Score:3, Informative)
Anyone else remember Int 27h [nvg.org] and the magic of hooking a subroutine to make it appear like your OS was actually multitasking?
No, because two years after SideKick came out, I was preemptively multitasking on an Amiga.
Sorry, just had to get that in there.
Re:You are Micro Focus (Score:2, Informative)
(weren't they trying to spin off that business?)
They DID spin off, I'm working in the CodeGear division, now integrated to Embarcadero technologies (DB Artisan, E/R Studio). We're doing well, thanks for asking.
Re:So Long... (Score:1, Informative)
Delphi is still my favorite language and it is still a thriving product with new releases each year. The reason Borland died is they sold their developer tools division (Delphi, C++ Builder, Delphi .NET, etc.) a couple of years ago, thus giving up their cash cow revenue stream that millions of developers continue to use!
Re:So Long... Star Team (Score:3, Informative)
Other than frequent crashes, s l o w r e f r e s h e s, a Java client made by saboteurs, a couple hundred millions interface inconsistences(in most screens, pressing enter or escape do nothing), a braindead labeling schema, tectonic-speed checkouts, rude and intrusive dialogs that steal focus from whatever the fuck you're doing, the fucking JVM that eats oodles of RAM, the goddamn interface that suddenly frozes for a minute or ten, the motherfucking MPX, the metric fucktons of annoying as hell bugs that send your goddamn motherfucking productivity down the tubes, the incredibly shitty compare and merge tool and a couple other things that spring readily to mind no, there's nothing bad
Yes, I'm a CM and use Starteam daily for my sins. Why do you ask?
Re:How many more (Score:2, Informative)
Um... it should also be noted that CodeGear was purchased by Embarcadero last year [infoworld.com]
Re:So Long... Star Team (Score:3, Informative)
I concur. I use it on Windows so it might be different elsewhere, but...
Network timeouts after disuse get annoying "Lost connection" messages - there's no way to recover. It's faster to CTRL_ALT_DEL and open task manager and kill javaw.exe than to attempt to close it using the X and battle the "i can't close the application because the server isn't responding" logic.
"Update Status" gets stuck sometimes and you can't even "compare files" to see if you are up to date. "File is locked"... have to kill ST and restart, which gets slower with every version. The "file compare" function gets stuck on "Finding differences" and the only solution is a) find the temp file that is causing problems and delete it b) when that doesn't work, because it won't, reinstall ST completely.
When you check in a file, and "compare differences" to make sure everything is entered in the check-in message, you can either type in the commit box, or scroll through the differences in the compare tool - but not both. You could in the old version, so they intentionally cocked this up looks like.
Enter a commit message and forget to lock the file first (for those 5-second changes) or if there is some conflict on the local drive and it errors, it throws away the entire message and you have to re-type if you want it back. That's when I learned the art of selecting all and copy before hitting enter. And sometimes that doesn't work, so select all, cut, paste, and then you're sure it's on the clipboard so hit OK.
I use the keyboard as much as possible, but it's shite for keyboarding as mentioned.
"View Manager" is a travesty. I have had so many conflicts and such I couldn't make sense of, and it took 4 hours to sync a vew!!!! I resorted to copying the files manually from one view to another and then manually re-check them in to bring the base view up to date. I finally gave up and used labels/tags instead.
You open it, and it takes several minutes to get to a usable state, so let it run in the background. Well it calls SetForegroundwindow() every time it accomplishes something, so just start it and read slashdot and ALT+TAB back to slashdot a few times. when you no longer notice that it's annoying you, it's been ready for a while and you just lost half your workday. It's not a tool for the impatient.
I did ask the server admin where one of my files went and they couldn't find it (it's in the view, but can't do anything with it), but that was maybe 2005 version and we have updated.
It's easy to have duplicate files with the same name, especially when merging views. So one is "unknown" and the other up to date, then you update the other file and they switch. One is locked, the other isn't... Depending on the situation and how it happened you can actually lose commit comments and history when this happens, just choose the most useful one and remove the other one.
The view settings by default go to the first one in the list, so I have someone else's filtering on every folder and have to change it. I can add my own view type, and if it's alphabetically before everyone else's, the ENTIRE USER BASE for that server gets my new view as default. Name it something dirty with a leading underscore or less-than and hilarity ensues. Maybe they fixed that in 2008, but that's seriously broken. It's actually very easy for a simple user to make changes that affect all other users, like re-locating the local repository location for individual files or whole folders.
You can program it using COM objects, and it's fairly easy to find samples on like codegear, if that still exists, but documentation is crap. I wrote a VB6 app that would check stuff in and out and lock it and do simple stuff, just so I didn't have to load this virus into memory. I used it to select files for review documentation, since it's very difficult to get information out.
I asked for a simple "Copy folder location" or "Open containing folder" function - you have to right-click, properties, and then it's hard to sele
Re:You are Micro Focus (Score:5, Informative)
"Borland's tools are really kewl, but they've never gained serious mindshare"
Wrong. Borland had more mindshare than Microsoft in development tools.
Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, Borland Pascal, Borland C and C++ where all more popular than Microsoft's tools. One reason was the cost. You could buy Turbo Pascal for around 10th the cost of a compiler from Microsoft. It also came with an IDE. Before that a lot of programmers used Wordstar to edit their code!
Borland lost mindshare and didn't do all that well during the migration to Windows. Frankly that is what really did in a lot of companies and Microsoft replaced them all! Lotus, Ashton-Tate, WordPerfect, and Borland all did very well until Microsoft pretty much killed them all. And yes a good part of it was caused by their failure to produce good Windows products.
"This compiler was, weirdly enough, written in COBOL. Somebody once explained to me why this made sense, but I've forgotten the explanation."
It is called bootstrapping.
The logic is this. If you make improvements in the compiler then you make improvements in your own product.
Let's say you create a better code generator. When you recompile your own compiler it will run faster since it is being compiled with that improved code generator.
It also helps you find bugs since you are using your own compiler everyday to write your compiler.
Re:Thank God I didn't invest in Delphi (Score:3, Informative)
And VB has been killed by .net as well so what did you gain?
Java is still doing great so you bet wrong.
Delphi's name (Score:3, Informative)
I think Borland underestimated two things: {...} and the way businesses used development platforms - to talk to databases.
Perhaps you should google around about Why Delphi was called Delphi.
Delphi was envisioned from the beginning as a platform to communicate with databases.