Comment Feed for Borland is Dead (Coffeehouse on Channel 9)

Re: Borland is Dead

Bass — Sun, 17 May 2009 15:53:26 GMT

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.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Borland is Dead

May28th2018 — Sun, 17 May 2009 03:43:32 GMT

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.

Re: Re: Re: Borland is Dead

rhm — Tue, 12 May 2009 21:31:29 GMT

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.

Re: Re: Borland is Dead

threent — Tue, 12 May 2009 18:44:15 GMT

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.

Re: Re: Borland is Dead

JohnAskew — Tue, 12 May 2009 14:30:05 GMT

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

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Borland is Dead

Sven Groot — Tue, 12 May 2009 12:58:51 GMT

Dutch for "hello". :)

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Borland is Dead

Joshua Ross — Tue, 12 May 2009 12:50:34 GMT

Hallo?

Re: Re: Re: Re: Borland is Dead

Erwin Blonk — Mon, 11 May 2009 13:42:35 GMT

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 :D

Re: Borland is Dead

Alexei Pavlov — Mon, 11 May 2009 13:33:05 GMT

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...

Re: Re: Re: Re: Borland is Dead

figuerres — Fri, 08 May 2009 13:49:46 GMT

Nope I skipped the 64 :-)

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 :-)

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 :-)

Re: Re: Re: Borland is Dead

Maddus Mattus — Fri, 08 May 2009 06:51:08 GMT

Dude,

You didnt own a Commodore 64?

You fail at ICT :D

Re: Borland is Dead

David Oliver — Thu, 07 May 2009 17:15:32 GMT

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.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Borland is Dead

raymond — Thu, 07 May 2009 16:07:50 GMT

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.

Re: Re: Re: Borland is Dead

rhm — Thu, 07 May 2009 13:40:07 GMT

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

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.

Re: Re: Borland is Dead

figuerres — Thu, 07 May 2009 12:56:04 GMT

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"

Re: Borland is Dead

Turbodad — Thu, 07 May 2009 12:30:31 GMT

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

Re: Borland is Dead

vesuvius — Thu, 07 May 2009 08:43:12 GMT

You guys are all showing your age

Re: Re: Re: Borland is Dead

ZippyV — Thu, 07 May 2009 08:36:04 GMT

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

Re: Re: Re: Borland is Dead

Ion Todirel — Thu, 07 May 2009 05:15:54 GMT

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...

Re: Re: Borland is Dead

DCMonkey — Thu, 07 May 2009 05:11:56 GMT

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++.

Re: Borland is Dead

bureX — Thu, 07 May 2009 02:24:30 GMT

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. :(

Re: Re: Borland is Dead

Ion Todirel — Thu, 07 May 2009 01:38:12 GMT

sad... Delphi was really a great IDE

Re: Borland is Dead

rhm — Thu, 07 May 2009 00:28:51 GMT

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