Philippe Ranger <.> wrote in message <79l2d0$ss...@forums.borland.com>... >Glynn: >>... and you never mentioned Turbo Prolog. I think it lasted almost >1 >whole year somewhere around 1988. ><<
>Sorry. Lasted more than a year. I *think* the engine was licensed from some >French developers, and that this was even mentioned when you ran it. An >interesting and justified trial balloon, even if nothing came of it.
Damn this thread makes me feel old. I remember running these at one time or another and installing many of them onto people's machines in a famous US trading house.[1]
- Ansa Paradox - Sidekick 1.51, aka the most heavily pirated software in the world. - Superkey (sp? a keyboard macro TSR)[2]
Remember when you had 5 essential TSRs and used a utility to swap them in and out because they all had to be loaded last?
Also wrote several install and machine checking utilities along with a DOS menuing system in Turbo Pascal 3.
And the best bit was that every single product was <$50 (apart from Ansa Paradox which was more like $1000)
And how about the Florida Devcon where they were showing the first pre- release copies of Delphi?
[1]While we're on the nostalgia kick, how about IBM Topview, Desqview and those people who did a complete MS Windows API for DOS
[2]Either this or Sidekick also did auto-dialing from any telephone number on a DOS screen using a Hayes 1200. Something, I haven't been able to do effectively since Windows appeared and the corporate phone systems all went to digital phones.
-- Julian Bond <mailto:jb...@palmstech.com> Palms Technology U.S. Inc. <http://www.palmstech.com> +44 (0)1920-460297 "So many words, so little time"
Rune Moberg wrote in message <36BDD692.8E70F...@runesbike.com>... >I even >mistook MIDAS for something else entirely, and thought three-tier could >be done without involving the complex MIDAS licensing stuff. (gee, why >is everyone looking at me like I'm coming out of the closet or >something?)
Three-tier CAN be done without MIDAS - I have 3-tier programs in D4 standard. MIDAS is just simpler to use. [But then I suffer from the Not-Developed-Here syndrome. <g>]
In article <79l2d6$ss...@forums.borland.com>, Philippe Ranger <?.?@?.?> writes
>Bob: >>After a couple of years of development, Kahn sold this company to ... >Motorola I think (not sure) for $300,000,000 USD. At least that was the >scoop in the trade journals. ><<
>I'm not sure about the price either, but this happened around last November. >I remember thinking that, if Philippe could sell that one-tune orchestra for >that kind of money, in so little time, well... what couldn't he have done >with Borland?
Maybe Borland should follow Apple and invite their leader back.
Let's have a rallying call which I will shorten to B4.
"Bring Back Borland's Barbarians"
-- Julian Bond <mailto:jb...@palmstech.com> Palms Technology U.S. Inc. <http://www.palmstech.com> +44 (0)1920-460297 "So many words, so little time"
Richard: >>computers would have to become more or less like any domestic electrical appliance <<
Either you have the wrong author, or Gates was quoting someone else (Alan Kay?) who practically has a trademark on "the computer as appliance".
That's more or less what happened. History has shown again and again that moving from open architectures to closed ones results in a loss of market share for the originator of that open architecture, <<
Pointing again to the gap Delphi can occupy — component-based app-building, where you can get the source to all components and recompile it at need, vs. the closed components used for VB, and the lack of true RAD for VC++ (not to speak of the language).
Leroy: >>IIRC, VisiCalc was an Apple II product, not CP/M. In fact, VisiCalc was *the* product that drove many businesses into buying Apple. <<
I could check this, but I'm too lazy. I still think Visicalc ran on the Z-80 card, therefore on CP/M. But the Apple II was just about the only thing with diskettes and enough of a market to make their particular format (among a score) a relative standard. So, to a business, it was the default Z-80 installation.
Philippe Ranger <.> wrote in message <79ml27$1...@forums.borland.com>... >I could check this, but I'm too lazy. I still think Visicalc ran on the Z-80 >card, therefore on CP/M. But the Apple II was just about the only thing with >diskettes and enough of a market to make their particular format (among a >score) a relative standard. So, to a business, it was the default Z-80 >installation.
VisiCalc definitely ran on Z-80. But this didn't mean only CP/M - I remember having either VisiCalc, or a very close clone on Spectrum!
The company's original name was MIT (I forget now what that stood for). The university was making legal noises and they renamed it Borland, taking the name of another company that owed them money when it went bancrupt.
My personal take on it was that Windows was the beginning of the end. Borland bet on OS2 originally, and was late to start on the Windows platform. By the time they got their products ported to Windows, Microsoft had market dominance in everything but databases. Paradox had a brief day in the sun, but was soon wiped out by a combination of bad management decisions and a price war they couldn't win.
Joe C. Hecht wrote: > Wow Philippe! That was a pretty darn good write up!!!!
> Mind if I add a couple of things???
> I heard that Phillipe started Borland because no > one would hire him.
> Borland rose to be the second (or debated third) > largest software institution.
> Phillipe was always rooting for the little guy. > He never forgot what it was like to be a small > and struggeling kitchentop programmer, and commonly > loved to take swings at the knee's of the big boys.
> Phillipe revelotionized software's legal side with > the famous "Borland No Nonsense License Agreement".
> As I recall, at one time, Borlands legal department > produced a series of legal documents for the small > programming guy, and offered them via fax and BBS.
> I believe the Borland forum on Compuserve was > (for awile) the largest forum base that Compuserve > had.
> Turbo Pascal was actually a product called PolyPascal, > produced by a kid Phillipe had gone to school with > (Anders) under Professor Niklaus Wirth (the father > of Pascal)
> Phillipe plays the Sax, and loves Turbo Porche 911's.
> StarFish has been pretty darn successful for a small > quiet private company that resides in Borland's old > offices.
> For good or bad, Phillipe got into a pricing war > with Microsoft(?). I think it was a Quattro vs Excel > war, dropping the price of the software down to $49 > (if I recall correctly). This forever changed the value > of business software in the open market. (remember > when PeachTree was $5000???)....
> The Borland campus (Borlands only tangable assett) > is valued at 100 million, and is a major thorn for > the company. It seems no one wants the building. > This is probably one of the biggest reasons Borland > has never been bought out <g>.
> Borland has since sold or licensed out most of the > non-hard-core developer and end user products, mostly > to the Corel folk...
> For awhile, Delphi's massive revinues have helped > to float the company and development of of other > products. Perhaps it still does ;)
> Yeah. Now that Gates is the richest man in the world, no matter where people > start from, the popular sport is to depict MS as the Devil. Mac Mavens have > a very strong team in that indoor sport. But the fact is that MS, and Gates > personally, were involved in the Mac from long before its launch. In the > case of Gates, he truly had faith that this, not the PC, was the way to make > personal computers. And indeed without MS the Mac would have sunk like a > rock — no apps to justify the price.
From the earliest days of MS (i.e. pre-IBM), Gates' vision was a computer in every home. I remember an interview years ago (although in what magazine I can no longer recall) in which he stated that for this to become a reality, computers would have to become more or less like any domestic electrical appliance, i.e. you just plug the thing in, turn it on, and use it. The Mac's little "all in one box", its GUI, mouse, and everything about it fitted in with his ideas of what a "computer for ordinary people" should be - you didn't even have to learn cryptic OS commands to use it. He was very enthusiastic about the machine (as indeed he had been about the earlier, experimental, and very expensive Lisa), but he was convinced that no single company could possibly dominate the entire market because attempts to do so would result in competing hardware and software standards which would fragment and confuse the market, thereby reducing the overall world demand for microcomputers. The key to enduring success for Apple (according to Gates) would be through licensing firmware, OS, and various other necessary bits and pieces to third-party manufacturers, thereby establishing a global standard which Apple would earn money from no matter who was actually building the computers people were buying.
Apple didn't listen, and nearly died as a result of being too greedy; by the time they eventually decided to allow Mac clones, they'd already lost the standards battle to Wintel (whose success was based on the very model Gates suggested to Apple before the first Mac ever rolled off the production line).
> It's impossible at this point to convince people the Mac isn't the model for > Windows, but the fact is that MS was closely involved in the Mac model > itself, and that the successive version of Windows were much more an attempt > at pursuing the same faith on the PC side, than an attempt at getting the PC > to "work like" a Mac.
This argument would only hold water if Apple had invented the GUI, which they didn't. What Apple did more or less invent was the idea of having a pull-down menu bar in a GUI (although menu bars had been used previously in text-mode applications), and this was the crux of the "look and feel" action against DR and MS (the earlier Xerox GUIs used pop-up context menus). However, as you say, Gates was not so much trying to copy Apple as making a statement (along with DR, Epson, and various other companies who produced GUIs) that there was a new and easier way of doing things with computers that promised to make them more generally approachable. Unfortunately, the PC platform proved ill-suited to the concept because of memory constraints, so GUIs were not really successful on it for nearly a decade (although they were extremely successful on the more powerful Atari ST and Amiga, which sold to a lot of home users, thus proving Gates' idea that GUIs were the key to his vision of a computer in every home).
> Gates has always had advice for Apple regarding the Mac, but I didn't know > about his early position regarding clones.
The legend is that he actually went down on his knees in an effort to get them to franchise the Mac firmware and OS, but this doesn't sound very Gates-like to me (he was never modest, even when MS were a tiny BASIC house). He did however try very hard to make Jobs and Wozniac see that they could actually make more money selling operating software to all of the people than by making the entire machine for just some of them.
> Speculative business history — > The PC was a kludge, but one that inherited from an open architecture, CP/M, > while the Mac on the contrary was a veering away from any openness, even the > half-openness of the Apple II. After many years, it became clear that it is > possible to build an open Mac from an open something else, but not from a > closed Mac.
That's more or less what happened. History has shown again and again that moving from open architectures to closed ones results in a loss of market share for the originator of that open architecture, even though the impetus for such a move is the desire to earn money by dominating the market. In the pre-micro days for example, IBM built an open big machine called the 360, and it was the Wintel of its day, becoming so dominant that entire industries grew up around it (3M for example started out making accessories for the 360). IBM were not happy with this because they actually made their money in those days by what we now call "dumping", i.e. they'd sell you a basic system for less than what it cost them to build it, and then stripe you up for the expansions that you quickly discovered were necessary to make the thing actually do anything. This plan didn't work anything like as well as it should have because all manner of upstart little companies sprung up offering 360 expansions (and even replacement machines that performed faster and were smaller and cheaper) for a lot less than IBM were charging - the 360 was the first machine in history to be "cloned".
IBM's answer to this problem was the 370, a more powerful system that supposedly offered all sorts of advantages (or at least would have if the OS had been finished - unfortunately, it wasn't, so IBM's customers ended up writing most of it for them). The 370 was also not an open system like its predecessor: IBM changed all the sockets that connected it to perpherals and refused to divulge the pin-outs, and it used a different instruction set, so all existing software had to be recompiled to run on it (and this recompilation wasn't a simple "bung it in the front and it comes out the back working" job).
To IBM's surprise, instead of jumping on the 370 bandwagon, a lot of their existing customers decided to stick with their 360 setups because they could upgrade to a "clone" CPU which actually offered better performance than the 370, and still make use of all their existing peripherals and software without the expense of recompiling (i.e. rewriting) it. A few decades later they repeated the same mistake with something called PS/2, thereby proving that being a part of history is no guarantee that one will learn from it...
As you said, Apple did the same with their move from the Apple-II (which, like the 360 and later PCs, had an entire industry dedicated to producing peripherals and expansions for it) to the much more "hush hush" Mac, thereby losing on the swings what they'd gained on the roundabouts by having a more capable machine with an interesting and new (in the home/small business market) idea of using a GUI.
Meanwhile, those who have stuck to open standards (e.g. Compaq) have gone from strength to strength, while Bill Gates has made a fortune doing what he told Apple would make them a fortune all those years ago, and the once mighty, protectionist IBM have been forced to use somebody else's open architecture running Mr. Gates' OS. In other markets, Ford own Jaguar and Volvo, and VW have R&R, thereby proving once and for all that there's a lot more money to be made selling cheap standard things to everybody than expensive specialist ones to a select few - always assuming of course that you are offering something they actually want to buy...
So much for more dBASE disinformation :-) dBASE was the database standard from late 1982 with its CPM release, DOS in 1983. dBASE was the database standard on the PC long before Paradox existed (or at least before it saw the light of the market). As to "inferior" to Paradox, well... that's a matter of opinion isn't it? I've used both for years and found dBASE to be much more robust. Paradox observed a more SQL-Like behavior, but the ubiquitous .dbf table had all kinds of support (especially in its indexes) and far fewer files needed to support its capabilities. It also had a strong clone market generating products like Fox, Clipper, Force and DBXL each of which improved upon the original, especially in adding any variety of compilers (including a native code compiler in Force). The great thing about Xbase is that it was infinitely "growable" in all its various guises.
Philippe Ranger wrote: > John: >> > Could someone please bring me up to speed with Borland history, in > particular where things started to go wrong. I know that in the mid to late > eighties, Borland were hurting Microsoft ("Kill Philippe!") with products > like Turbo Pascal and Quattro Pro. Is it true that Delphi was a make or > break product? What's the background on this Del character? All I know is > that as well as running the show, he's grossly overpaid and has a fondness > for pizzas. What happened to Philippe Kahn anyway? And just who was Frank > Borland? Sorry for my ignorance. > <<
> I have never worked at or for Borland, I have no inside story here, and I'm > working from memory. So —
> I don't know when "Frank" Borland popped up, but the rumor I tend to > subscribe to is that Borland was taken as an American-sounding name for a > company, because of Frank Bormann, the astronaut.
> Borland came to attention in late 1983, with an ad in Byte for Turbo Pascal, > at $50 by mail. That product was so innovative in so many ways (marketing > being not the least of them), someone should do a book. Anyhow, TP took "the > world" by storm. Version 2 came out in June 84 and version 3 in April 85.
> At about that time, Borland, now an established company, started coming out > with a slew of utility-type products. One of the very first, Sidekick (not > like the current thing) was again a major innovation that marked the > industry. Especially, Sidekick's user interface slowly became the standard > for all PC apps until Windows 3 came along 5 years later.
> Now, from all appearances, this stuff was bought, and seldom did the authors > stick around for recasts. Borland was unable to follow up on any of its > utilities, even SK, which remained stuck at version 1.53. Likewise, TP's > very innovative "IDE" used an editor built on a binary-code machine Borland > did not own the code for. That same machine was offered separately in an > "Editor Toolbox" for TP3, and, paf! editors sprouted by the dozen > (literally). Almost ALL Dos-based editors were born from this, unless they > were ported from VMS, Unix, etc. But Borland could not improve in any way on > the original binary editor (bined).
> Likewise, in the summer of 86, if memory serves, a summer intern was hired > to "port" to TP to Basic, and Turbo Basic was born and launched. Again, it > could not follow on itself, and eventually ended up resold to its author. I > believe the first Turbo C was also a renamed third-party product. But in > this case Borland did manage to update it and, through several versions, > make it "theirs". Borland C++ v. 1 appeared in summer 89 (if memory serves), > and it was truly Borland. Also, again, earth-shaking.
> Though there was a long lull before TP4 (last days of 87), the fact is that > at least TP was a purely-Borland enterprise. The author was Anders > Hejlsberg. Anders more or less moved to other things, I understand, while > Delphi 2 was a-building, and soon after was hired by Microsoft by paving his > path with gold. At the same time (again, if memory serves) the Delphi > business manager was similarly, er, seduced. But I'm getting ahead of > myself.
> Anyhow, Anders was little-known except among TP afficionados (the kind of > people who hang around here), and Borland was identified with its president, > Philippe Kahn, a Frenchman. The more Borland grew, the more Kahn became a > public figure, and by the late 80's he was sounding a bit like the Divine > Ellison. As long as Borland found NEW products to launch, in the brouhaha it > went rather unnoticed that it couldn't follow-up on any of its past > successes except TP and TC.
> One exception. Rather early, perhaps 85, Borland bought a very promising > database **maker**, Paradox, and simply left it to its own devices. But the > product itself was never more than an also-ran on the market, compared to > the remarkably inferior dBase, which willy-nilly made itself the standard > from 85 onwards.
> So Borland bought the oldest WP app on Earth, which it relaunched as Sprint. > It bought one spreadsheet maker (everyone was making better spreadsheet than > Lotus, but Lotus was totally the standard), and let it disappear from view. > It bought another one, Quattro (Spanish for "beyond 1-2-3), got to work on > it (and kept at it), and quickly got a massive suit from friendly Lotus. > That really hurt prospects. A bit later, it bought the best-known > programmer's editor, Brief, and let that disappear too. Btw, at the time > Excel was a perpetual money-loser for MS and Quattro wasn't really a threat. > The war was with Lotus.
> And in the summer of 91 it bought not dBase, but the whole of Ashton-Tate > (twice the employees but not twice the revenues). At a price I don't > remember but found unbelievably inflated (this was pre-Web times, people > actually figured sofware companies the way you'd figure tire companies).
> Then things really, really went wrong. There was no way Borland could digest > A-T fast enough to get all the nourishment, and it really needed it for the > price it paid. Also, by that time every one's major concern was, not just > getting out a Windows version, but getting out a superior Windows version. > Everything had to be redone. If you notice, WordPerfect Corp., which totally > dominated its (larger) market and bought nothing also lost it at that point.
> Concerning dBase, there was a rumor Borland had a dBase for Win in its > files, which it could not launch because of the legal threat from A-T. It > seems it wasn't true, dBase for Win was quite late. And Paradox was late > too. Quattro held on by the skin of its teeth, but in the meanwhile MS > knocked the teeth out of the true enemy, 1-2-3, which was also using the > Kahn policy of buying stuff right, left and center. Lotus wound up sold to > IBM mostly for one of those purchases, Notes. I cite WPC and Lotus to show > that, with very different management styles, other MS competitors also went > down the drain during the early nineties.
> In 92 BP7 (Borland Pascal 7) came out, and it was the second version for > Windows. I may think the world of it, but the world thought otherwise, and > it was a marketing dud. I truly don't understand why, but the common > explanation is that by that time VB was gaining a lot of attention. Anyhow, > at the time Borland desperately needed at least to hold on to its old > revenue sources.
> Note. Del has clearly operated an developer/enterprise switch. "Developer" > is practically synonymous with the old (eighties) market for TP. The people > who really saw what the enterprise end was, in marketing, were people at MS. > They brought in the notion of the Suite, early 91, and this is really how > they killed off both giants so quickly, Lotus and WPC. Well, enterprise > appeal was what was missing from BP7 marketing, and what quickly grew > regarding VB.
> Anyhow, at that time, 91-94, Borland still had by far the best C++ compiler > for Windows, and that part of the business did well. But MS could just pour > money into compiler improvements (starting at least three full years late), > and finally managed to make its VC++ the standard, before Win95 showed up. I > say this through gnashed teeth, the Borland solutions at the time were > almost always superior.
> Well, besides BC++, Borland had mostly trouble. Truly, the remarkable thing > is that it did NOT go down the drain, the way WPC and Lotus did. But both > its databases were disappearing from view, all other A-T products had been > dropped, Quattro was a poor second to Excel, and BP was... well was having > no new version.
> There was a rumor about a "VBK" (VB Killer) in the works as the successor, > but clearly Borland did not have the money, if not to develop it, to market > it. In any case, Delphi 1 came out in early 95, at a point where any notion > of a VBK was ridiculous. It did meet with remarkable success, considering > conditions. Stock watchers, who had nothing else to hang on, said it was > "make or break". This was obviously true from the balance sheet. If money > didn't come in from Delphi, pretty soon there wouldn't be enough to print a > balance sheet on. I do think BCB and Jbuilder were financed on the returns > (and prospects) of Delphi. But I may be wrong. Anyway, Delphi gave Borland a > new life in (rather limited) public notice, for a time.
> Among the expenses Borland could do without was the salary paid Philippe, > especially as his style wasn't what was needed by that time. So he went out > the door (can't remember exactly when, 94 probably), taking with him a nice > severance package and one product, the new Sidekick. On this he built > Starfish software, currently noted mostly for the Rex credit-card-sized PDA, > for which Starfish has rights on the sw.
> Replacing him, at much lower salary, was not easy. Especially as Delphi > didn't keep climbing on the charts. The CEO's office had something of a very > unthankful revolving door, and by summer 96 was occupied by a member of the
1. As part of Phillippe's severance, he got two products, not one: Sidekick and Dashboard. Both were included in Corel's suite.
2. Starfish was sold last year to Motorola, which put more than $15 million on Inprise's balance sheet as a result of its 10% stake in Starfish.
3. I differ with much of your analysis as to what went wrong. What went wrong, to a great extent, was Microsoft - and Phillippe's inability to walk away from a head-to-head battle with Gates. If you remember, much of the resources of the early '90s went into the Borland/Word Perfect Suite (later the Borland/Novell suite), which was a direct competitor to the MS Office Suite. Obviously, it lost the battle and left Borland with an unfocused collection of products and no office suite to sustain them.
The same for dBASE. Contrary to what you indicate, and despite Borland's problems in getting a clean compiler and Windows version out, dBASE produced very significant revenue for Borland for a number of years. What happened to dBASE and Paradox both was -Access-. When Borland bought dBASE, it sold for $895 a copy with "Lan Packs" sold on a per-seat basis. Once Gates launched Access as a $99 stand-alone product and a member of the "Pro" suite (specifically targeted as a "Kahn Killer",by the way), the handwriting was on the wall for both Paradox and dBASE as "end-user desktop databases".
-- --- A. A. Katz (Alan)-----------Borland TeamB---- --- Ksoft Inc --- Johnson City, NY --- http://www.ksoftinc.com --- --- Editor, Visual dBase Web Magazine --- http://www.ksoftinc.com/vdb -------------------------------------------------
The Mac was the successor the the Lisa. Both were the successor to the graphic user-interface developed at Xerox PARC. Microsoft -licensed- the Windows interface from Apple. The original GUI was tiled. Microsoft changed it to "nested" and overlapping windows which resulted in the famous lawsuit between MS and Apple.
Philippe Ranger wrote: > Richard: >>Excel was originally written for the Mackintosh, a machine that > Bill > Gates liked because he felt that GUIs were the way to go (he literally > begged > Apple to license Mac ROMs to clone makers in order to establish it as a > standard; they didn't listen - if they had, then history might have been > rather different). > <<
> Yeah. Now that Gates is the richest man in the world, no matter where people > start from, the popular sport is to depict MS as the Devil. Mac Mavens have > a very strong team in that indoor sport. But the fact is that MS, and Gates > personally, were involved in the Mac from long before its launch. In the > case of Gates, he truly had faith that this, not the PC, was the way to make > personal computers. And indeed without MS the Mac would have sunk like a > rock — no apps to justify the price.
> It's impossible at this point to convince people the Mac isn't the model for > Windows, but the fact is that MS was closely involved in the Mac model > itself, and that the successive version of Windows were much more an attempt > at pursuing the same faith on the PC side, than an attempt at getting the PC > to "work like" a Mac.
> Gates has always had advice for Apple regarding the Mac, but I didn't know > about his early position regarding clones. Speculative business history — > The PC was a kludge, but one that inherited from an open architecture, CP/M, > while the Mac on the contrary was a veering away from any openness, even the > half-openness of the Apple II. After many years, it became clear that it is > possible to build an open Mac from an open something else, but not from a > closed Mac.
> PhR
-- --- A. A. Katz (Alan)-----------Borland TeamB---- --- Ksoft Inc --- Johnson City, NY --- http://www.ksoftinc.com --- --- Editor, Visual dBase Web Magazine --- http://www.ksoftinc.com/vdb -------------------------------------------------
Richard Bayarri Bartual wrote: > I liked Turbo-Prolog too - it even had relational database capabilities. > While criticised by Prolog purists for its inability to assert rules as > well as data, it was a true compiler that produced tight executables and > had a superb development environment.
Turbo Prolog still lives as Visual Prolog at http://www.pdc.dk/vip/. The guys from the Prolog Development Center built Turbo Prolog for Borland, were working here in Scotts Valley and licensed the rights back when we got out of the Prolog business.
-- David Intersimone "david i" Director, Developer Relations Inprise Corporation, Borland and VisiBroker products See you at the 10th Annual Inprise Conference Philadelphia, July 17-21, 1999
Mark Richter wrote: > I seem to recall at some gathering that a (then) Borland representative > indicated that Turbo Basic came under fire due to some problems with > licensing or other issues, particularly regarding an integrated > debugger. Maybe these issues were close to the cause of Turbo Basic > never being pursued any further. I found it to be a remarkable product > with tremendous speed and capabilities.
Turbo Basic 1.0 was a success. It frightened Microsoft so much that they quickly came out with QuickBasic 3.0 in response while they continued to work on Quick Basic 4.0 (the edit and continue product). Visual Basic was no where in sight at that point. There were never any licensing issues or integrated debugger issues.
-- David Intersimone "david i" Director, Developer Relations Inprise Corporation, Borland and VisiBroker products See you at the 10th Annual Inprise Conference Philadelphia, July 17-21, 1999
my visicalc version ran on the apple II. it did not require a Z80 card.
Philippe Ranger wrote:
> Leroy: >>IIRC, VisiCalc was an Apple II product, not CP/M. In fact, VisiCalc > was > *the* product that drove many businesses into buying Apple. > <<
> I could check this, but I'm too lazy. I still think Visicalc ran on the Z-80 > card, therefore on CP/M. But the Apple II was just about the only thing with > diskettes and enough of a market to make their particular format (among a > score) a relative standard. So, to a business, it was the default Z-80 > installation.
> PhR
-- David Intersimone "david i" Director, Developer Relations Inprise Corporation, Borland and VisiBroker products See you at the 10th Annual Inprise Conference Philadelphia, July 17-21, 1999
I love reading all this. it is very interesting to see what people think from the outside and to understand how much mythology and misinformation is out there. I did write a column about the history of the borland name - you can find it at http://www.borland.com/firehose/1998/04-29-98.html
Philippe Ranger wrote: > I don't know when "Frank" Borland popped up, but the rumor I tend to > subscribe to is that Borland was taken as an American-sounding name for a > company, because of Frank Bormann, the astronaut.
the company name heritage is in the column. the name Frank Borland first appeared (as far as I know) in the opening paragraph of the Turbo Tutor version 1 manual. I have the text at home and will post it later along with some great line art.
> Now, from all appearances, this stuff was bought, and seldom did the authors > stick around for recasts. Borland was unable to follow up on any of its > utilities, even SK, which remained stuck at version 1.53. Likewise, TP's > very innovative "IDE" used an editor built on a binary-code machine Borland > did not own the code for. That same machine was offered separately in an > "Editor Toolbox" for TP3, and, paf! editors sprouted by the dozen > (literally). Almost ALL Dos-based editors were born from this, unless they > were ported from VMS, Unix, etc. But Borland could not improve in any way on > the original binary editor (bined).
the above paragraph is littered with mistakes and untruths. Many of the original developers of products stayed with the company and worked on other products. yes, some of them eventually left (doesn't everyone except me?). The sidekick editor appeared in Turbo Pascal 1 and on. two editors were shipped with the Turbo Editor Toolbox - the binary editor and a pascal source code version. Sidekick went on to be revised many times and is still being worked on today at Starfish. There was Sidekick 2, Sidekick 2 Plus, Sidekick for Windows, etc.
> Likewise, in the summer of 86, if memory serves, a summer intern was hired > to "port" to TP to Basic, and Turbo Basic was born and launched. Again, it > could not follow on itself, and eventually ended up resold to its author.
This is the funniest one of all. I don't know who that summer intern was, must have been the one who fetched coffee and donuts for the real developer of Turbo Basic - Bob Zale. Turbo Basic is still alive in Bob's Power Basic. I think Philippe met Bob at a user group meeting in Chicago and Bob joined Borland to work on Turbo Basic. I was running language R&D at the time. We shipped TB 1.0 and 1.1. We licensed back TB to Bob when we decided to get out of the Basic compiler market. you can find power basic at http://www.powerbasic.com/.
> I believe the first Turbo C was also a renamed third-party product. But in > this case Borland did manage to update it and, through several versions, > make it "theirs". Borland C++ v. 1 appeared in summer 89 (if memory serves), > and it was truly Borland. Also, again, earth-shaking.
The compiler for Turbo C came from the Wizard C compiler by Bob Jervis who joined the company. The linker came from work being done at Borland, the run-time library came from Wizard C and work done at Borland. Future versions were all internal work by Borland employees.
> Though there was a long lull before TP4 (last days of 87), the fact is that > at least TP was a purely-Borland enterprise. The author was Anders > Hejlsberg. Anders more or less moved to other things, I understand, while > Delphi 2 was a-building, and soon after was hired by Microsoft by paving his > path with gold. At the same time (again, if memory serves) the Delphi > business manager was similarly, er, seduced. But I'm getting ahead of > myself.
Actually the first pascal compiler by Anders was called Poly Pascal for the Z80. Borland acquired the rights to that compiler, added the sidekick editor and run in memory technology to create Turbo Pascal 1.0. Who is this Delphi business manager that was seduced? are you talking about Gary Whizin the R&D director - he retired from computers.
> Anyhow, Anders was little-known except among TP afficionados (the kind of > people who hang around here), and Borland was identified with its president, > Philippe Kahn, a Frenchman. The more Borland grew, the more Kahn became a > public figure, and by the late 80's he was sounding a bit like the Divine > Ellison. As long as Borland found NEW products to launch, in the brouhaha it > went rather unnoticed that it couldn't follow-up on any of its past > successes except TP and TC.
Anders is known to millions of developers around the world. there were articles in european magazines and also Computer Language here in the US with pictures of Anders, Chuck J and Gary.
> One exception. Rather early, perhaps 85, Borland bought a very promising > database **maker**, Paradox, and simply left it to its own devices. But the > product itself was never more than an also-ran on the market, compared to > the remarkably inferior dBase, which willy-nilly made itself the standard > from 85 onwards.
dBase and Paradox were the leaders in the database market. Paradox, Quattro, Sidekick, Reflex, along with our developer tools all fueled the growth of Borland. The database market changed dramatically when Access 1.0 was launched with a $99 price.
> So Borland bought the oldest WP app on Earth, which it relaunched as Sprint. > It bought one spreadsheet maker (everyone was making better spreadsheet than > Lotus, but Lotus was totally the standard), and let it disappear from view. > It bought another one, Quattro (Spanish for "beyond 1-2-3), got to work on > it (and kept at it), and quickly got a massive suit from friendly Lotus. > That really hurt prospects. A bit later, it bought the best-known > programmer's editor, Brief, and let that disappear too. Btw, at the time > Excel was a perpetual money-loser for MS and Quattro wasn't really a threat. > The war was with Lotus.
I don't ever remember buying a spreadsheet maker. we did find some assembly language programmers in Hungary who had built a better than 1-2-3 spreadsheet that became Quattro. We did buy Surpass to add spreadsheet technology and engineering to the Quattro Pro team. I think I remember that Microsoft Excel was purchased from another company.
> In 92 BP7 (Borland Pascal 7) came out, and it was the second version for > Windows. I may think the world of it, but the world thought otherwise, and > it was a marketing dud. I truly don't understand why, but the common > explanation is that by that time VB was gaining a lot of attention. Anyhow, > at the time Borland desperately needed at least to hold on to its old > revenue sources.
There are many sociological reasons for the decline of Pascal compilers. The schools and universities were switching from Pascal to Modula to Ada. The Educational Testing Service (ETS) switched the advanced placement test from Pascal to C++. C/C++ had become the choice for the majority of software engineers.
Don't let my message be a deterrent to all those who can add to the collective memory of Borland history. I'm sure that my 13.5 years here have caused my recollections to be fuzzy. I stand ready to be corrected at all times.
ps: if anyone has a copy of the Turbo Tutor v1.0 floppy, and the Turbo Prolog v1.1 system disk - can they send me a zip of the files? thanks.
-- David Intersimone "david i" Director, Developer Relations Inprise Corporation, Borland and VisiBroker products See you at the 10th Annual Inprise Conference Philadelphia, July 17-21, 1999
> Glynn: >>... and you never mentioned Turbo Prolog. I think it lasted almost > 1 whole year somewhere around 1988. > <<
> Sorry. Lasted more than a year. I *think* the engine was licensed from some > French developers, and that this was even mentioned when you ran it. An > interesting and justified trial balloon, even if nothing came of it.
Borland shipped Turbo Prolog 1.0 and 1.1. we were finishing version 2.0 when we stopped in that market.
-- David Intersimone "david i" Director, Developer Relations Inprise Corporation, Borland and VisiBroker products See you at the 10th Annual Inprise Conference Philadelphia, July 17-21, 1999
Mark Richter <mrich...@emceesoftware.com> wrote: >I believe dBase was a port over from the CP/M world onto the "new" >PC-DOS. dBase II (at the time) was pretty much the only option, and was >widely popular with those of CP/M heritage.
Yes, as I recall it was originally called Vulcan, one of the 1st relational databases for PC's.
>Again, Lotus was a migration from the CP/M VisiCalc (I believe that was >the name). Kapor had apparently written the earlier product, and owned >the rights for the port.
IIRC, VisiCalc was an Apple II product, not CP/M. In fact, VisiCalc was *the* product that drove many businesses into buying Apple. Also, I don't think Kapor owned the rights to VisiCalc, but built 1-2-3 as an improvement after leaving Personal Software(?), which it definitely was. I think I still have the original pre-release dealer version of 1-2-3 somewhere. As I remember, the executable was just over 90K, an incredibility large program for the times. I also think Kapor was the 1st to offer a keyboard template for the function keys on the PC keyboard.
>Wasn't MS offering at the time a PC-DOS port of MultiPlan, or some such >product? I thought Excel came in with the first Windows offering...
Yes, I'd forgotten about MultiPlan! Compared to Mitch Kapor's 1-2-3, MultiPlan was terrible. In fact, compared to VisiCalc MultiPlan was terrible...
This thread is waking a bunch of old memories... -------------------------------------------------------------- - Leroy Casterline Cahill Casterline Ltd 970/484-2212 - - Electronics/ASM/C/Delphi/CBuilder/Telephony/Instrumentation- --------------------------------------------------------------
Janet: >> The company's original name was MIT (I forget now what that stood for). The university was making legal noises and they renamed it Borland, taking the name of another company that owed them money when it went bancrupt. <<
Not the first time I've read this. Only, it didn't "catch". Thanks for the reminder, I'll try to remember henceforth.
My personal take on it was that Windows was the beginning of the end. Borland bet on OS2 originally, and was late to start on the Windows platform. <<
That's interesting. Prior to the fall 1990, perhaps later, I think MS was pushing everyone "serious" towards OS/2.
Alan: >>So much for more dBASE disinformation :-) dBASE was the database standard from late 1982 with its CPM release, DOS in 1983. <<
Well, thank you, Alan, for the courtesy of calling my post disinformation, and quoting the whole of it (in case someone doesn't have a newsreader), but not pointing out the disinformation. :-) ;-)
I suppose the guilty part is actually this sentence about Paradox —
PhR: >>> But the product itself was never more than an also-ran on the market, compared to the remarkably inferior dBase, which willy-nilly made itself the standard from 85 onwards. <<<
This is disinformation? By the way, just checked Programmers At Work (MS Press, 86) —
-------------- [C. Wayne Ratliff] in 1978 began writing the Vulcan program, which he marketed by himself from 1979 to 1980. In late 1980 he entered into a marketing agreement with Ashton-Tate and renamed the Vulcan product dBase II. --------------
As to "inferior" to Paradox, well... that's a matter of opinion isn't it? <<
I am not talking about all the improved non-clones — who possibly could clone dBase II without improving on it? Foxbase, Clipper, etc. came by because the bloody thing WAS the standard — that's the point of the indicted sentence. As it happens, I worked more than I'd have wished to with authentic, genuine dBase (never set up a system on my initiative, though, just came in aftet idiots did). Hated every second line of it. Then I didn't work with Paradox, unfortunately, just used it. What a revelation!
Alan: >>1. As part of Phillippe's severance, he got two products, not one: Sidekick and Dashboard. Both were included in Corel's suite. <<
Yeah, I remembered that later.
3. I differ with much of your analysis as to what went wrong. What went wrong, to a great extent, was Microsoft - and Phillippe's inability to walk away from a head-to-head battle with Gates. If you remember, much of the resources of the early '90s went into the Borland/Word Perfect Suite (later the Borland/Novell suite), which was a direct competitor to the MS Office Suite. Obviously, it lost the battle and left Borland with an unfocused collection of products and no office suite to sustain them. <<
Well, we differ. I think the goose was cooked while the ink was still wet on the check for Ashton-Tate, in 91. AND that this was just the last episode in an ongoing Kahnian adventure that was masked by the financial success of three products, and image success of some others (which, along with Sidekick, couldn't get into version 2).
The made-up suites appeared to be the only way to market Borland's and WPC's Windows versions once they were finally out. Many millions had been spent in the effort, it seemed reasonable to not just open the drain and flush them as too late. Especially for WPC, which would have thereby closed its doors.
Contrary to what you indicate, and despite Borland's problems in getting a clean compiler and Windows version out, dBASE produced very significant revenue for Borland for a number of years. <<
Nothing to pay for what A-T had cost. Enough perhaps to cover Borland's own development costs. What DID I indicate?
"A.A.Katz (Alan)" wrote: > What happened to > dBASE and Paradox both was -Access-. When Borland bought dBASE, it sold for $895 > a copy with "Lan Packs" sold on a per-seat basis. Once Gates launched Access as > a $99 stand-alone product and a member of the "Pro" suite (specifically targeted > as a "Kahn Killer",by the way), the handwriting was on the wall for both Paradox > and dBASE as "end-user desktop databases".
More illegal monopoly-behavior and bundling by Microsoft. Too bad the DOJ waited so many years before breaking up Microsoft.
..................... Richard Grossman rgross...@techIII.com
Dave: >> Many of the original developers of products stayed with the company and worked on other products. yes, some of them eventually left (doesn't everyone except me?). The sidekick editor appeared in Turbo Pascal 1 and on. two editors were shipped with the Turbo Editor Toolbox - the binary editor and a pascal source code version. Sidekick went on to be revised many times and is still being worked on today at Starfish. There was Sidekick 2, Sidekick 2 Plus, Sidekick for Windows, etc. <<
OK. Where was version 2 of Lightning, Reflex, SuperKey? The Bined? These were successful products. Was there any shared code in the kernel of Sidekick between versions 1 and 2? (From version 2, it was indeed a Borland development, but the parentage from 1 was rather non-obvious.) Why was there such a lapse between 1.53 and 2, that 2 was met with "Auld lang syne"?
This is the funniest one of all. I don't know who that summer intern was, must have been the one who fetched coffee and donuts for the real developer of Turbo Basic - Bob Zale. Turbo Basic is still alive in Bob's Power Basic. I think Philippe met Bob at a user group meeting in Chicago and Bob joined Borland to work on Turbo Basic. <<
The "summer intern" may have gotten tacked on somewhere, I'm working from memory. I think it's Bob Zale who wrote that he was "hired to do TB".
Who is this Delphi business manager that was seduced? are you talking about Gary Whizin the R&D director - he retired from computers. <<
No. Chinese name, I think. Anyhow, someone who else left for Redmond with Anders, at a similarly high raider's price.
The database market changed dramatically when Access 1.0 was launched with a $99 price. <<
This is where I'm totally fuzzy. I missed it at the time, thought Access was a lightweight joke. Was I ever wrong! So, you're saying that right there, in version 1, that thing was a winner? All I heard about was people staying with Dos databases. How did it really look?
I don't ever remember buying a spreadsheet maker. we did find some assembly language programmers in Hungary who had built a better than 1-2-3 spreadsheet that became Quattro. We did buy Surpass to add spreadsheet technology and engineering to the Quattro Pro team. <<
I didn't remember Quattro as a Borland launch — otoh I've never known it as anything but pure Borland. Yeah, memory tickled now. Didn't Philippe speak of Vroom, if you remember that, as Quattro 1 technology? By the way, do you know what happened to Lucid 3D?
Don't let my message be a deterrent to all those who can add to the collective memory of Borland history. <<
Well, it sure began with a rumble like "this is my turf, don't tread on me".
David: >>my visicalc version ran on the apple II. it did not require a Z80 card. <<
Well, then I stand corrected. But I had another reason — normally the Z80 came with 80-col support, and a spreadsheet on 40 columns... Was that Visicalc on 40 columns, or was there a separate 80-col card on the machine? Native-Apple Visicalc with 80 columns would make sense as a business machine.
