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Borland Software Corporation (formerly Borland International, Inc.) is a software company (NASDAQ: BORL (http://quotes.nasdaq.com/asp/SummaryQuote.asp?symbol=BORL&selected=BORL)), located in Scotts Valley, California, best known for its Turbo Pascal programming tool that has evolved into today's Delphi programming language.
The 1980s: Foundations
Borland was founded in 1983 by French math teacher Philippe Kahn, who led the company as it developed a series of well-regarded software development tools. Their first product was Turbo Pascal, initially developed by Anders Hejlsberg. 1984 saw the launch of SideKick, a time organization, notebook and calculator utility. In September 1987 Borland purchased Ansa-Software including their Paradox (version 2.0) database management tool. The Quattro Pro spreadsheet was launched in 1989 with, at the time, a notable charting capability.
Borland's release of Turbo Pascal is also famous because that was almost the only case in the whole history when Microsoft has experienced really serios difficulties due to rivals. Microsoft was the leading provider of programming languages before Turbo Pascal was released. When Borland released Turbo Pascal, Microsoft switched over to developing operating systems and application software, because Turbo Pascal's IDE was much better than Microsoft's pure compilers and interpreters.
The 1990s: Rise and fall
In September 1991 Borland purchased Ashton-Tate, bringing the dBase database to the house, however the high price they paid was to be one of the causes of subsequent financial difficulties, which were worsened when Microsoft launched the competing database Microsoft Access and bought the dBase clone FoxPro in 1992, undercutting Borland's prices.
During the early-1990s Borland's implementation of C++ was considered superior to then-market-trailing Microsoft. Also, its development of Paradox, with its ObjectPAL programming language, pitted it against software by Microsoft, in particular Access.
By the mid-1990s, Borland fell from dominance in the software tools market. Some people thought that competition from Microsoft was to blame.
Others felt that Philippe Kahn spread his company's resources too thinly over too many projects, in an attempt to battle Microsoft on many fronts. Kahn left the company in 1994.
The Delphi 1 rapid application development (RAD) environment was launched in 1995, under the leadership of Anders Hejlsberg.
The Inprise years
On April 29, 1998, Borland went through a name change to Inprise Corporation (The name comes from the slogan Integrate the Enterprise), and refocused its efforts on targeting enterprise applications development with Delphi and on creating tools for Java development, like JBuilder.
For a number of years (both before and during the Inprise name) Borland suffered from serious financial losses and very poor public image. In fact when the name was changed to Inprise many thought Borland went out of business.
In October 1996, Paradox was sold to Corel.
dBase was sold in 1999, as Inprise decided to concentrate on software development tools.
A proposed merger between Inprise and Corel was announced in February 2000, aimed at producing Linux based products, however the scheme was abandoned when Corel's shares fell.
InterBase 6.0 was made available as an open source product in July 2000.
Borland reborn in name and fame
The Borland name (Borland Software Corporation) replaced Inprise in January 2001.
Today, under the Borland name and a new management team headed by President and CEO Dale L. Fuller, a now-smaller and profitable Borland continues work on Delphi, and created a version of Delphi and C++ Builder for Linux, both under the name Kylix. This brought Borland's expertise in Integrated Development Environments to the Linux platform for the first time. Kylix was launched in 2001.
Borland made a commitment to the technology of web services releasing Delphi 6 as the first Integrated Development Environment to support web services. Now all of their current development platforms support web services.
C#Builder was released in 2003 as a native C# development tool, competing head-on with Visual Studio .NET. C#Builder, Delphi for Win32, and Delphi for .NET have since been combined into a single IDE, Delphi 2005. Supporting web services and now .NET is doing a lot to bolster Borland's image in the industry. With their consistent profitability, in late 2002 Borland purchased design tool vendor TogetherSoft and configuration change management tool publisher StarTeam. The latest releases of JBuilder and C#Builder integrate these tools to give developers a broader set of tools for development.
Current products
Borland's current product line includes:
- C#Builder (2003)
- C++Builder
- C++BuilderX
- Delphi
- JBuilder
- Kylix
- Optimizeit Suite
- InterBase
- JDataStore
- Borland Enterprise Studio For Java
- Borland Enterprise Studio For Windows
- Borland Enterprise Server AppServer Edition
- Borland Enterprise Server VisiBroker Edition
- Borland Enterprise Server Web Edition
- StarTeam
- Together
- Caliber RM
Old software, mostly for DOS
Compilers:
Utilities:
Applications:
External links
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