Borland
More info
- Creator
- Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad, Philippe Kahn
- Released
- 1983–2009
- Type
- Software company
- Successor
- Acquired by Micro Focus (2009)
The rebels of developer tools: sold a fast Pascal compiler for $49.95 when rivals charged hundreds, and taught a generation to program.
Borland was started in 1983 by three Danes and the Frenchman Philippe Kahn. Its first hit was Turbo Pascal, written by Anders Hejlsberg: editor, compiler and runtime in one program that compiled in seconds. It was, in effect, the first modern IDE for personal computers. Turbo C and Turbo C++ followed, along with the Quattro Pro spreadsheet and the Paradox database.
The high point was Delphi in 1995, visual Windows development in Object Pascal. The following year Microsoft poached Hejlsberg, who went on to design C#. Borland renamed itself Inprise in 1998, changed its mind in 2001, sold the developer tools to Embarcadero in 2008 and was bought by Micro Focus a year later.