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."
Who is Micro Focus? (Score:5, Funny)
"Micro Focus Net Express® is the market-leading COBOL development environment"
So, a company that should've died off in the nineties is being bought by a company that noone has ever heard of that should've died off in the eighties. Weird.
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: (Score:2)
Their Cobol IDE and compiler was still pretty awful, though. I suffered through a class in '01 using their program.
It was nowhere near as nice as Visual Studio 6 or even Vim.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Indeed. In much the same vein, I hope that gcc will some day include support for AppleBASIC.
Re:Who is Micro Focus? (Score:4, Funny)
Having a million-color monitor makes COBOL soooo much friendlier than 8. It's just the touch COBOL needed. I like my GO TO statements to be Sunrise Chartreuse. Any other color and they'd be mistaken for PIC statements.
Re:Who is Micro Focus? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
First thing to cross my mind when I read the headline was "holy crap, Borland's still around?"
Second thing that crossed my mind was "What, they haven't changed their name yet again in the last couple of years?"
I guess you can call this the "not with a bang, but a whimper ..." stage.
Re:Who is Micro Focus? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Who is Micro Focus? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not sure which company surprised me more that it still existed! I was a MAJOR fan of Borland's products starting with Turbo Pascal 1... you have to remember that way back then compiling and linking even a 50-line Fortran program was a several minute operation, and suddenly it went down to several seconds.
I hung tough with Borland products for about 8 years, even buying Turbo Pascal 4 around 1988, just for the editor, even though I no longer used Pascal. I took advantage, along with several co-workers of a misprint in Egghead's flyer for the week to pick up Borland C++ 1.0, and later did some serious OWL program. To this day, I still think OWL was far better than MFC.
I even thought Object Pascal was a nice implementation, and would have enjoyed using it if the team had decided that way. They ended up going with Microsoft C++, which was good, even if MFC at the time was nothing better than a half-hearted first cut.
I spent many years using Visual C++ and generally loved it. To this day, VS6 is my favorite IDE. None of my clients and employers ever made the jump to .NET and by 2004 or so, I'd made the jump to working on Linux middleware... no so much because I didn't want to Windows any more, but because that's was the best job available.
As of today, I'm glad I'm not doing Windows C++ programming any more. The number of layers between the code and the metal has become so ridiculous you're hardly programming at all. It's all just cookbook code to use Microsoft's byzantine libraries, and then reverse-engineering them when they don't do what you expect or what the documentation says. Of course, one could argue it's always been like that, but 10 years ago, it was possible to rewrite and/or extend most of MFC into something really slick and way easier and faster to use. I know because I did it. Nowadays, I would dread having to wade into the enormous amount of stuff involved in Windows programming... whether it's good or bad, it's massive and complicated, and those are two things I can't abide.
Re:Who is Micro Focus? (Score:5, Insightful)
To this day, I still think OWL was far better than MFC.
Might this be because _anything_ is better than MFC?
You are Micro Focus (Score:4, Insightful)
COBOL may not have much mindshare among slashdotters, but there's a lot of COBOL code out there. Most of those boring apps that do nothing but apply simple business logic, like the one that cuts your paycheck, are written in COBOL. Remember the Y2K crisis? That was mostly about COBOL apps.
Which isn't a defense for the continued existence of COBOL. I only disagree with your statement that it should've died off in the 80s because I think it never should have been invented, with its stupid pseudo-English syntax. But like Fortran and RPG, it's too well established to be disposed of.
Assuming that Borland still does IDEs and compilers (weren't they trying to spin off that business?) this is a really good fit. Borland's tools are really kewl, but they've never gained serious mindshare, and survive only because of a lot of diehard users. Not, strictly speaking, legacy tools, but really the same kind of marketplace.
Incidentally, I used to work for Convergent Technologies, which back in the early 80s sold a MicroFocus COBOL compiler for its 68010 UNIX boxes. This compiler was, weirdly enough, written in COBOL. Somebody once explained to me why this made sense, but I've forgotten the explanation.
Re:You are Micro Focus (Score:5, Funny)
Do you have Tourette's syndrome, or is there some other reason why your post is liberally sprinkled with shouted obscenities?
Re:You are Micro Focus (Score:5, Funny)
Go FORTRAN yourself, you FrameMaker.
Re: (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.
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
I started to wonder if people bitching about COBOL have written a single business/enterprise application serving to thousands or even millions?
I see there is a language which is designed for writing business applications and even named that way, runs on mainframes which are worth millions and serving to thousands in mission critical environments and people who didn't write a single line of code (in that sense) keep bitching about it. It is not you I talk about, it is a general thing.
In Video business, we ke
Re:You are Micro Focus (Score:4, Interesting)
Algol was invented during that time frame. It had problems of its own, but it was the first step towards modern block-structured languages like Pascal and C. COBOL was a big step in the wrong direction. I mean, a compiler for "English"? Didn't it occur to Ensign Hopper that there's a reason mathematicians don't work in plain language?
I was on the Unix side, so my involvement with workstations was limited to being an end user. But I did have an nGen (which Burroughs OEMed as the B20 series) on my desk. I'll always be sorry that there was no place for the thing once lack of total IBM compatibility became a deal-breaker. There were so many things that were better thought out than other systems. Like those external, passively-cooled power supplies. And a keyboard where they actually thought through serious use cases, instead of just kludging onto the original teletype keyboard, as most keyboards still do.
Re:You are Micro Focus (Score:4, Funny)
Troll? What idiot did I offend this time? And how? Is somebody a Grace Hopper fanboy? If so, you really need to get a life!
Re:You are Micro Focus (Score:4, Insightful)
Well for one, you could correctly identify Ms. Hopper as a Lieutenant at the time of the event. Calling her an Ensign was a severe slap in the face of her reputation.
Secondly, her idea of using English to program computers was a new one at the time she came up with it. Her initial implementation may have not been up to the standards of modern block-control languages, but that is to be expected with an early prototype.
Thirdly, she didn't invent COBOL per se. She created a language called FLO-MATIC. COBOL was defined by committee (CODASYL) based on both Lt. Hopper's work and input from IBM. Ms. Hopper latter lead the charge to properly standardize the language, but that was long after the cat was out of the bag.
Lastly, show a bit of respect for your elders. She was a pioneer working in uncharted territories. She wasn't going to get it right straight off the bat. But her ideas did have a profound impact on the industry, and lead to the block-structured languages you are so fond of.
(Posting anonymously to prevent undoing modding in this thread. No, I wasn't the one who modded you fm6.)
P.S.: Kudos on mentioning B20s. BTOS was the Microsoft Office of its day. ;-)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
By the time she made this decision to write a parser for English, there were plenty of people who could have told her it was a bad idea.
Trouble is, there were also approximately the same number of people who thought it'd be the best thing ever. The entire idea behind "english" based languages is that they'd supposedly be simple to teach to non-engineers. The aim with COBOL was not to make the life of highly technically literate software engineers easier, it was to enable ordinary business analysts and accountants to become software engineers.
As it turns out, this notion was entirely too optimistic. Business analysts and accountants aren'
Re:You are Micro Focus (Score:4, Insightful)
Right, honestly COBOL was a success in that it was really THE FIRST highlevel language. It actually dates to the 40's with Grace Hopper in the Navy. After commercialization in the 50's it really did achieve its goals of being,
1.Resonably self documenting
2.Something non-programmers who would have been assembly jocks at the time could use
3.Write once run anywhere, programs written for 60's era IBM mainframes will run perfectly on you brand new System Z today. Its usually trivial to port programs to different hardware when your compiler vendor makes a product for the destination platform, its not terribly harder to port to another vendors COBOL in most cases.
COBOL is still a good choice for large control break processing type operations like account reconciliation in mainframe environments. Its not terribly hard to maintain, where it is hard is when where someone did tricks manipulate the normal representation of the things like dates in memory to save a few bytes. In the last 15 years people have pretty much stopped playing games and are doing it the COBOL way which does use 4 bytes in most cases to store "2009". Memory and storage are not so expensive anymore as to make this a problem.
If what you want to do is detail 500,000 telephone bills; COBOL is still a good way to go about it as there are few tools that would truly be easily understood by just anyone looking at them.
I am not saying lets all start developing complex applications in COBOL but it STILL has a place in some tasks.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Yes, it's rather like a newsflash that the Hanseatic league has declared war on the Duchy of Burgundy. What? Where? And who cares?
To get back to the subject, in my first "proper" (post college) job the first month was training on Microfukers Cowbull. I will never forgive anyone involved, including myself.
Re:Who is Micro Focus? (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, it's rather like a newsflash that the Hanseatic league has declared war on the Duchy of Burgundy. What? Where? And who cares?
You mean it's too late to catch the 11:30 auto-gyro to the Prussian embassy in Siam?
They flew under the radar. (Score:2)
So, a company that should've died off in the nineties is being bought by a company that noone has ever heard of that should've died off in the eighties. Weird.
Micro Focus is still around, because Microsoft saw no reason to acquire or crush them back in the eighties or nineties.
Weird.
No, not weird, but it shows that you can run a business in a niche, but profitable market by flying under the acquisition or crush radars of other giants. If they are not worried about you, they are not going to acquire or crush you.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Just because you haven't heard of Micro Focus does not mean "noone" has. Micro Focus is very well know in every IT shop that has a mainframe. Yes, COBOL is still the mainstay language for applications in large enterprises. They've been predicting it's imminent death for most of the 30 years I've been in IT, but it's still around. Believe it or not, the also push OO COBOL. Yes, it's as bad and idea as it sounds.
The sad thing is that Borland practically invented the IDE. Microsoft hired away the develope
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (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.
So Long... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's too bad the company went under like that, but I would have to blame the executives for making such massively bone-headed business decisions.
Anybody remember Inprise? After about a year of incredible downturn, they decided, "You know what? Maybe Borland wasn't a bad name after all"
Idiots
Delphi *was* my favorite language
Re:So Long... Star Team (Score:2)
I'm forced to use Star Team, and although it has some nice features there are a LOT of things wrong with it. It is a good example of an anti-productivity tool. Can't believe they bought it. I have a suspicion they don't use it for their own source control, or they would have fixed a lot fo these things a long time ago. Nice as Turbo C/Pascal were in the day, and although I never used it Delphi seemed reasonable, I agree 100% bonehead.
Re: (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 se
Re: (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 an
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: (Score:2)
Re: (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: (Score:3, Interesting)
Aaah good old terminate-and-stay-resident programs, from the heydays of non-multitasking OSs. Anyone else remember Int 27h and the magic of hooking a subroutine to make it appear like your OS was actually multitasking? Hmph...kids these days..
And they all wanted to be loaded last, and took militant action to make sure that they had their hands on Int27h. I remember reading some assembler source from the era where one of the first chunks of code was commented as "Duke it out with Sidekick"...
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Aaah good old terminate-and-stay-resident programs,
Terminate and stay resident? You mean, when a cyborg that looks like Arnold Scharzenegger kills someone and then moves into their house?
ah borland (Score:4, Funny)
Er.. not that i wrote malware. >_>
What? (Score:2)
Borland is still around? I assumed they'd died back in the mid-90s...
Great acquisition, Micro Focus. Are you going after Norton next?
Re: (Score:2)
Great acquisition, Micro Focus. Are you going after Norton next?
I read somewhere that they're going after Beagle Brothers.
C++ Builder is the best C++ IDE for RAD, by far. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a shame that they are going under, because C++ Builder is he best C++ IDE for Rapid Application Development, by far.
You can design forms and controls in the same way as Visual Basic, but it is C++.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You can design forms and controls in the same way as Visual Basic, but it is C++.
I thought that was called Visual C++.
Re: (Score:2)
Not hard, but extremely tedious. Especially when something like C++ Builder has these as properties for the widgets in the IDE.
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: (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: (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.
Re: (Score:2)
You can design forms and controls in the same way as Visual Basic, but it is C++.
Wow! So it's exactly like Microsoft's Visual C++, except less-supported!
Seriously, how out-of-date is your knowledge that you didn't know about Visual C++? It's been around for ages-- hell it's probably the reason most companies dumped Borland Builder.
Re: (Score:2)
But it hasn't been for almost a decade so... welcome to the modern era!
turbo-Pascal (Score:5, Funny)
Man - between all that bullshit and bands like "A Flock of Haircuts" it was enough to make Max Headroom hurhurhur-HURL!
RS
Re:turbo-Pascal (Score:5, Funny)
I'm glad the "turbo" trend died. Long live "X-treme"!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
and now it's You*. YouTube, YouPorn, YouEverything...
Re: (Score:2)
It was just another case of electronics geeks trying to make automotive metaphors — the most badass cars at the time were all TURBOcharged.
Re: (Score:2)
Best part was the acronym: TP
Every time you'd ask for help with TP on a newsgroup, some wise-ass would make a toilet paper "joke." Got old really fast.
Don't forget dBASE (Score:2)
dBASE wasn't their downfall (Score:3, Insightful)
Buying Ashton-Tate, maker of dBASE, was their downfall. Huge outlay and the migration to windows was a massive failure.
That wasn't their downfall. Their downfall was the same thing that made WordPerfect an also-ran, that virtually destroyed Novell, that ended Netscape, and heavily contributed to the end of Sun: Microsoft.
Love them or hate them (and at Slashdot it's usually the latter), Microsoft is single-handedly responsible for the deaths of many tech companies. In Borland's case, they simply couldn't survive against MS Visual Studio. Everything else they did or did not do pales against that fact.
sad (Score:2, Interesting)
First Sun now Borland? Very sad but in both cases you had good technology and poor management. I realize that IBM's funded free Eclipse made hurt Borland JBuilder sales but to sell off the development tools division? Really?
Odd (Score:5, Funny)
I'm not sure what surprised me more when I read this: that Borland still exists, or that Micro Focus still exists.
Turbo C (Score:5, Interesting)
Let us not forget that Borland had a pretty dominate position in the programming C/C++ IDE market way
back in the early 90s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_C%2B%2B [wikipedia.org]
I remember all of the C programming college courses in my area all used Turbo C as the preferred IDE.
I remember that many folks claimed Microsoft sabotaged Borland's product by integrating their Visual Studio with windows in ways that Borland just could not do. This was years before the Netscape lawsuit! I even seem to recall reading that Microsoft was accused of preying on Borland's staff and hiring them away. Perhaps someone with more knowledge than I can provide some more information on those bygone days.
Re: (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: (Score:3, Interesting)
I fondly remember writing my own GUI environment that ran on top of DOS--I hated Windows 3.11--using Borland C++ using BGI for graphics (although I abstracted it in case I wanted to port) and inline assembly to handle interrupts and for critical sections. I modelled my GUI on AmigaOS (I was missing my Amiga) and it even multitasked. In 2000 I did a rebuild of my system and backed up all my src code onto CD, formatted the drive, installed redhat 5 or something, stuck the CD back in to put my src back on the
Compuware's "Optimal Advisor"... (Score:2)
...included [developers.net] a BSD-licensed open source utility I worked on - PMD [sf.net]. I recall getting some nice emails and phone calls from them saying they were packaging it up, and they sent in some bugfixes and new rules and whatnot. They bought a couple of copies of my PMD book [pmdapplied.com], too, which was nice.
Generally, I thought they were a good example of how a software company could bundle up and enhance open source software, contribute back, and still turn a profit. Selling that part of the business for $58M, sounds like it w
Re: (Score:2)
Compuware had 3 essential tools for mainframe development (IBM 370)
Abend-Aid - automated dump solver for when you program core-dumped.
File-Aid - Easily the best file browser for the mainframe. I'd love to see a similar tool on Windows or Linux that allowed you to create customized text and binary file formats for viewing file innards.
Xpediter - mainframe debugger.
Borland gives me warm memories (Score:2)
Thinking of Borland still gives me fuzzy memories. Every IDE they have made I have liked using (i even liked Kylix in itself, except it was impossible to use on (or the applications for that matter) non supported distributions of Linux).
I know they effectively died because of their decision to focus on the middleware.
Their tools were great, but it was sad that their management couldn't plan the products for the newer market place.
Re: (Score:2)
Thinking of Borland still gives me fuzzy memories.
Yeah, me too. Although I think my memory is just getting fuzzy 'cause I'm getting old and drank too much beer last night.
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.
Delphi was much bigger (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe they sold more Delphi licenses than turbo pascal. Furthermore I think Delphi was the the impetus at Microsoft for things like the MS developing a true IDE, J++/visual J and finally C# which btw was architected by the very same guy that did Delphi.
The biggest shame was when at the end Borland tried to sell their compiler business for roughly $1b no one wanted it, eventually some veritably unknown company called Embarcadero made an offer for $24m for the business and that was the end of that.
Lesson of the day: Regardless of how good/essential the products you deliver may have been, bad management and poor future insight can make you crash and burn.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Visual Basic killed Delphi. Delphi was always a better language/runtime/platform, unfortunately it was full of Pascal.
VB had the advantage of being far more approachable from a beginners standpoint, and I think Borland underestimated two things: the market for third party components (which was *huge* with VB) and the way businesses used development platforms - to talk to databases. The first few versions of Delphi were not exactly database friendly, while VB4 was Jet/SQL Server ready out of the box through
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Worse than that: it was Pascal enough to annoy people used to BASIC, but not actually Pascal enough to be standard Pascal.
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.
Used to love Borland Products (Score:2)
I bought 3 different versions of their Turbo C++ products and Turbo Assembler in the 90's, and had a great time with them learning to program. But then came along C++ Builder, which ended the affair. I gave Kylix a try after I switched to Linux to see if I couldn't rekindle the flame but that was like pouring a bucket of water on smoldering embers.
Bring Back Paradox (Score:4, Interesting)
My favorite Borland product was Paradox for Windows [wikipedia.org], a RDBMS engine and GUI with IDE. The engine was available as a C++ library for embedding. It brought together programming and data techniques from spreadsheets, databases, languages and GUIs that made "Windows" a complete and consistent platform.
Borland, or somebody, could do exactly that with existing OSS code today. The software world could use such a tidy tool, and especially a competent company to market it. Maybe that's Oracle now, but the game is just getting rebooted again.
Re: (Score:2)
My company actually still has a couple of old databases in Paradox that they still use. I developed in Paradox (PAL) for about 8 years. It was a great platform that blew away anything else at the time, short of maybe Foxpro. We had several CRM systems built on it.
Paradox for Windows was a complete flop, and because DOS Paradox used native Novell server file sharing/locking- it was unusable on a Windows network. I think that's what ultimately killed it.
Borland App Server (Score:2)
Turbo Pascal rocked! (Score:3, Interesting)
It was blinding fast for a compiler of its day, running on a 1 MHz Z-80. There was no debugger, but if a Turbo Pascal program halted with an error at a given location (which it would politely print out before quitting), you could run the compiler to find out which line of code that location represented. It was cheap, too -- fifty bucks or so at a time when other compiler makers were charging $300 or more.
I wrote a computer game in Turbo Pascal that got me my first job in the game industry. VERY fond memories.
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...
Don't Forget Quattro and Paradox (Score:5, Interesting)
Two very popular Borland products back in the day were the Quattro Pro spreadsheet and the Paradox relational database. Quattro Pro had WYSIWYG and three dimensional features running on DOS way before Lotus. Paradox was a huge advance over dBase III in ease of use and report writing.
If you had 2 MB of system RAM, they could both exist in system memory at the same time and swap back and forth. Not quite multitasking, but innovative at the time. Using DR DOS made the memory tricks easier. Ah... memories.
One more star has gone dark (Score:2)
First of all, before I go on a trip down memory land, WTH?
When have they left Scotts Valley? Bloody traitors.
Okay, now that I have gotten that out of my system, I remember when Turbo C kicked Microsoft's Quick C into oblivion. I mean, when Quick C could muster maybe 80K size out of a simplest program, Turbo C could squish it to maybe 12K. Don't laugh, in early days of DOS, that was important.
Also, anyone remember register pseudo-variables in Borland C? God, they ruled. Combined with the "
IBM just walked away from OS/2 (Score:2)
I thought OS/2 was a joint project [theinquirer.net] between IBM and Microsoft? Perhaps that explains Borlands decision to commitment to OS/2 too seriously. MS also leaned on IBM to drop OS/2 [cnet.com] else it would be forced to pay higher prices for software. See also IBM chief: Microsoft killed OS/2 [bbc.co.uk]
Turbo Pascal challenged Microsofts dominance ? (Score:2)
I thought the original Turbo Pascal [experiencefestival.com] was a one-pass compiler that ran from memory as compared to Microsoft's Pascal two pass compiler and linker that ran from floppies. Turbo Pascal also ran as an IDE. Microsoft Windows didn't even exist at the time. So the logic of how Borland challenged Microsoft's dominance in the application-development market escapes me.
--
ms.time.paradox©
Borland still exists? (Score:2)
Wow, blast from the past...
Looking foward to TurboCOBOL (Score:2)
Cause, that would be awesome.
Star Team? (Score:2)
What exactly is Micro Focus buying from Borland since they seem to have divested themselves of everything except something called StarTeam...I went to their website and I'm still not 100% what StarTeam is or does for me.
Maybe that's why they're in dire straits...they make software that takes multiple pages and graphics and bullet points and still doesn't seem to convey exactly how this will help me.
What really killed Borland... (Score:2)
... was its amusingly heavy reliance on people consistently agreeing to buy suspiciously frequent "upgrades" to development software that already worked just fine. Borland tried to create a sort of subscriptions-based business model without actual subscriptions, and people balked. Borland never made quite as much money as it anticipated; it underestimated the fiscal and material conservatism of its target market.
Re: (Score:2)
"if we break their apps when we install, it will serve them right [tuxrocks.com]. guess they took the approach of shoot first, explain later"
Phillip... (Score:2)
Last I heard of Borland was (Score:2)
Last I heard of Borland was when I purchased Borland's C++ DOS based IDE. That must have been back in the early to mid 90s. I'm surprised they are still around and at that, producing $172m in revenues!
Creepy Borland Pascal story (Score:2)
I remember turbo pascal / borland pascal. I never liked Pascal, and it took 25 years to figure out why.
Do you remember "Second Life"? I guess it still is operating. For awhile they had weekly/daily slashvertisements but they seem to have gone away. Anyway, SL would not allow arbitrary usernames, you had to select one of their predefined last names. Pascal was available. Unfortunately someone already selected first name "GNU" and "Turbo" was long gone... I thought it would be funny to be called "Borla
Borland ?--? Embarcadero (Score:2)
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.
Turbo Pascal (Score:2)
Ah, the great teaching tool that it was. A fairly strict and clean language with few possibilities to shoot yourself in the foot, a simple-to-use 2D graphics library, and excellent IDE for that time, complete with integrated debugger - and all that made it an ideal platform for teaching programming. It's still used in many Russian schools today for just that purpose. There are even unofficial (but complete and fairly good) translations of Turbo Pascal help files to Russian, to help in this.
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: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.
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: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, in my experience 2009 is rock solid. 2007 was already OK. I agree 2005 was crap.
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: (Score:2)
I have a lot of fond memories of Turbo Pascal from the 80s and early 90s. It was inexpensive and fast- a combination that was hard to get in those days.
I have to admit though- I thought Borland died years ago.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
As someone who is on the team that manages StarTeam at a large company, I wholeheartedly agree. Bah, and I just made it through the 2008R2 upgrade...
Re: (Score:2)
I loved getting a new version of borland C. You would receive a box with 23 3.5" floppy disks...
Not to mention the pile of blue (and I think later versions were orange) books, that came with the gaggle of floppy disks, that just took up lots of room on my bookshelf.
...on my massive 15 inch monitor.
You had a 15" monitor? Wow. Wait, so did I. Carry on.
Re: (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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Almost ten years ago, in my early twenties, I asked in a forum which language to learn for relatively simple, Windows applications. I am not a professional programmer, just a hobbyist.
Most people replied that the best language for RAD was Delphi. A few said go with Java. I didn't choose any of these, I preferred Visual Basic to have the peace-of-mind of Microsoft.
Delphi died when the .NET and C# arrived, Java will probably lose its mojo now that Oracle leads the development. I don't know, we may hate Microsoft but most of the times is the last player standing.
If you've learned Delphi, you wouldn't have trouble switching to C# when that arrived. The language at 1.0 embodied many of the same design concepts (not surprising, since lead designer is the same), and the UI library (WinForms) had that definite VCL'ish smell.
And VB? I mean, that VB6 -> VB.NET migration was a major change, the languages are only vaguely similar syntactically, but semantically they're significantly different.
Anyway, 10 years ago when you asked, Delphi was definitely the right tool for t