Borland is Dead | The Coffeehouse

DCMonkey
Monkey see, monkey do, monkey will destroy you!

After selling off their underappreciated Delphi RAD IDE/Language/Framework to Embarcadero last year to concentrate on "application lifecycle management" corporate shelfware, Borland is now being bought by MicroFocus, known mostly (to me at least) for their COBOL compiler.

What a sad end to a once great company.

rhm

They bet their future on Java in the mid '90s. Haha, at least Sun got killed by their own poison as well Smiley

Ion Todirel
buuu

In reply to rhm

#May 6th @ 5:28 PM

sad... Delphi was really a great IDE

bureX
Always a step ahead in stupidity.

Awww nuts... Borland Delphi was my first IDE ever, it's what started pulling me into the coding world before I even knew what a programming language was... I'm kind of bummed out to see Borland dissapear like that. Sad

DCMonkey
Monkey see, monkey do, monkey will destroy you!

In reply to bureX

#May 6th @ 7:24 PM

Well, Delphi itself is still alive, but when I see the name Borland, I think all those great late 80's early 90's products. I learned OOP with Turbo Pascal 5.5. I did alot of database mangling with Paradox for DOS. There was brief time where Borland C++ was a better Windows IDE than Visual C++.

Ion Todirel
buuu

I was pointing at the company who used to make it, I grow up with Turbo Pascal and Turbo C then a bit of Delphi and after that Visual Studio. Good times...

ZippyV
Fired Up

A multi-window application on the desktop is not what I call a "great IDE".

vesuvius
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

You guys are all showing your age

Turbodad

Sad indeed. I'm going to show my age too: I started learning programming with Turbo Pascal 3.

figuerres
???

In reply to Turbodad

#May 7th @ 5:30 AM

i will match that and go deeper:

I started with a Commodore Vic-20

3K of ram, screen was a TV at about 30 chars on a line ...

first hardware options were using soldering iron to make 2 expansion cart's into one:

that gave me 6k of ram + graphics commands and debug commands.

second project was a homebrew A to D convrter to allow me to use a tapedeck to store programs.
that was a lot cheaper than buying a special C= data cassete drive.

later I had a C= 128 and leanred about CP/M 80 and memory bank switching with the later 6502 compatable chip used in the C=128 ( 8502 I think it was??)
for the 128 I had an assembler and a C compiler
that was how I first got exposure to what C and Unix were like.

the C package had a command line that was like a Unix "C shell"

rhm

In reply to figuerres

#May 7th @ 5:56 AM

I think we should save the 8 bit stories for our therapists or something Smiley

I bought my first PC in 1990 and soon after bought Borland Turbo C++ v1 - although I only used it as a C compiler. It was a revelation - a nice multi-file text editor with a built in source debugger. It was a great place to learn your first C because the API surface wasn't much bigger than the classic libC - I feel sorry for anyone learning to program for the first time in a modern environment.

Borland started to lose out with their C/C++ products pretty early on in the Windows growth cycle. The last version I bought was Borland C++ v4 in about 1994. I wrote a few programs for Windows 3.1 using Borland's OWL (object-windows library), which was easier to get to grips with than MFC and more object oriented, but a bit bloaty on the memory front. Microsoft started licencing MFC to other compiler vendors which marginalised OWL. Then ofc they came out with Visual Studio and that's what got most programmers using Microsoft compilers instead of Borland or Watcom.

raymond

In reply to ZippyV

#May 7th @ 1:36 AM

Sounds like your a one window kind of guy.

Kind of limiting.

Expand your horizons, try a two window application and work your way up.

Love multi-window applications.

Sabot
My name is Dave Oliver. I'm a Technical Architect.

Borland always tried too hard to be 'the' alternative but didn't gain enough market share to drive it forward.

I remember having a deep decision on VB4 v Delphi many years back. On paper Delphi beat VB4 hands-down, compiled, true OO , got on really well with Windows, did 32bit well, etc. From a developers point of view it was nicer language to code, the IDE rocked. So all boxes ticked? Well all but some really big ones!

Delphi didn't do ODBC, instead it had it's on database connection system that not every DB vender supported, or supported badly.

Delphi didn't do OCX, again it had it's own components just at the time when VB coders where saving man-months by buying someone elses components and plugging them in. Borland didn't quite land square on this gravy train with their own variant of OCX.

... and now the killer ... VB was cheaper.

Maddus Mattus
Do, or do not. There is no try. - Yoda

In reply to figuerres

#May 7th @ 5:56 AM

Dude,

You didnt own a Commodore 64?

You fail at ICT Big Smile

figuerres
???

In reply to Maddus Mattus

#May 7th @ 11:51 PM

Nope I skipped the 64 Smiley

but the 128 was really a 64 in two ways:

1) 90% of the system was the same.
2) there was a "64 mode" for games and stuff i forget now but you held down two keys and it would come up in c=64 mode and run all the c=64 games.

that aside i was the guy who had the tools to fix things for the local c= users group bbs
the guy who ran the bbs had me helping him mod bbs files and one time he had to get me to fix a floppy disk.
he had like 3 1541 drives and a fancy 1.2 meg drive that used a special driver to work with the rest of the c=64 stuff.
on day he goofed and the driver tried to write to a normal disk that had a bunch of bbs files ....
i had a c=128 app that would let me sector-edit commodore format disks, i save the bbs from losing a bunch of data with that tool Smiley

also I had an Amiga 500 before I started on the PC and Mac stuff.
I also used to fix the old Mac's -- the like first and second generation one pice ones.

Yeah I been at this a little while Smiley

BlackTiger
If you stumbled and fell down, it doesn't mean yet, that you're going in the wrong direction.

Eah... Dead... Finally. Or once again? Or definitely finally?
Original Borland is dead for many-many-many years already, actually.
Misfortune, bad management, overestimates, strong competitors and friendemies like Microsoft.

Duke Nukem For(n)ever is dead, Borland is dead...
Who's next? "Old skool" passing away, unfortunately.

But what in exchange? Nothing... Beta-culture, googlism...

Erwin Blonk

In reply to rhm

#May 7th @ 6:40 AM

TRS-80 Model III, where art thou........

I can still remember the approximate date, weather, exact location and occasion of the first computer I sat behind and some of the company that was with me.
And, oh, my very first program:
10 Print "H"
20 Print " a"
30 Print " l"
40 Print " l"
50 Print " o"
60 Goto 10

Clever, I know.

Well, I mean, I had learned of the very existence of programming 2 minutes before that and wanted to outsmart the other kids that were as new to it at least somewhat. Two lines didn't do it for me Big Smile

JoshRoss
A righteous infliction of retribution manifested by an appropriate agent.

In reply to Erwin Blonk

#May 11th @ 6:42 AM

Hallo?

Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...

In reply to JoshRoss

#May 12th @ 5:50 AM

Dutch for "hello". Smiley

JohnAskew
9 girl in pink sweater

In reply to BlackTiger

#May 11th @ 6:33 AM

Yes, apparently someone dug Borland back up out of the grave to verify that it is dead... truly, most sincerely dead...

threent

VCL is much better than ocx, and it's more like today's .net component than ocx. There were more third party VCL venders than ocx at that time , devexpress, turbopower etc. etc.

rhm

In reply to threent

#May 12th @ 11:44 AM

Dream on. Judging by components listed on the ComponentSource marketplace, which I was a regular user of from it's establishment up to a few years ago, VCL was never even close to either VBX or ActiveX in terms of the number of components available. There was a healthy supply, but you must have only been looking at Delphi related outlets if you think there was more VCL stuff than there was ActiveX or VBX.

May28th2018
May 28th, 2018

In reply to rhm

#May 12th @ 2:31 PM

Borland pissed all over their unfortunate share holders. That is their greatest folly.

I think it reflects badly on the NASDAQ that they did not force Borland to delist last year when they ran out of money. They should have been delisted to protect investors. If not then, then now they should be forced to OTC trade.

Bass
Channel 9, best used in moderation

You'll can see Borland brought it up on itself, but there is no way in hell a company like Borland can compete on the same level as Microsoft. Borland had no chance of survival, their business model was to make money from Microsoft's platform. Quite frankly, if Microsoft decides they want to own your market, and especially if it's a market Microsoft already has an advantage in, you better have like $20 billion in the bank to fight them off, or you will go bankrupt.

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