Borland Rip

[Jingthing]

Some of you older geeks will remember Borland in its heyday as a potential rival to Microsoft. Oh well ... So sad ...

http://www.itwriting.com/blog/1413-the-end...icro-focus.html

[niveknedwob]

Never a rival as such - borland had a different offering. Borland based their wares on what MS offered as an O/S at the time.

[Jingthing]

Never a rival as such - borland had a different offering. Borland based their wares on what MS offered as an O/S at the time.

Yes they were but not in operating systems. In the 80s they were challenging with applications, spreadsheets and databases. These were the early days ...

Philippe Kahn (Borland CEO) eating his Ashton Tate mistake

[NanLaew]

Yes, I had some superb reporting spreadsheets created in Borland's Quattro PRO that eventually, sadly, couldn't be kept compatible with the faster evolving and more universal Excel. I recall being impressed with it's default WYSIWYG when publishing any files; didn't have to faff about with print-preview and page-break preview and sh!te like that. I think I may still have a mint, boxed copy of Quattro PRO in the office in Houston. Must be at least 10 floppy discs!

[OriginalPoster]

Never a rival as such - borland had a different offering. Borland based their wares on what MS offered as an O/S at the time.

Yes they were but not in operating systems. In the 80s they were challenging with applications, spreadsheets and databases. These were the early days ...

Plus they had Turbo Pascal and later Delphi, which were terrific development environments in their day. Microsoft eventually hired the architect of those products away from Borland; he's the guy that was behind the creation of Microsoft's C# programming language a few years back.

[cdnvic]

I can remember using their stuff in the early 90s. Like Lotus, Compuserve, and others, they were big players but never made the transition to the period of the internet becoming mainstream successfully.

RIP