Borland Software Corporation (formerly Borland International, Inc.) is a software company (NASDAQ NM: BORL), located in Scotts Valley, California, best known for its Turbo Pascal programming tool that has evolved into today's Delphi programming language.
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2 1990s 3 Inprise 4 Borland Reborn 5 Current Products 6 Old Software 7 External links |
1980s
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.
The first product launches was Turbo Pascal, initially developed by Anders Hejlsberg.
1984, saw the launch of SideKick, a time organisation, 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 capabilty.
1990s
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 databases Access and FoxPro in 1992, undercutting Borland's prices.
During the mid-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 Microsoft 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 Phillipe 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 developement environment was launched in 1995, under the leadership of Anders Hejlsberg.
Inprise
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 Febryary 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
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, a version of Delphi for Linux was launched in 2001.
Recently Borland made a commitment to the new 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. Delphi 7, the most recent version, also compiles to Microsoft's .NET. C#Builder was released in 2003 as a native C# development tool, competing head-on with Visual Studio .NET. 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.
Turbo Pascal,
Turbo C,
Turbo Prolog,
Turbo BASIC,
TASM,
SideKick,
Reflex,
Quattro Pro
DBaseCurrent Products
Borland's current product line includes:
Old Software