A brief history of Borland's Delphi
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| Pascal | | Delphi uses the language Pascal, a third generation structured language. It is what is called a highly typed language. This promotes a clean, consistent programming style, and, importantly, results in more reliable applications. Pascal has a considerable heritage:
| | Beginnings | | Pascal appeared relatively late in the history of programming languages. It probably benefited from this, learning from Fortran, Cobol and IBM's PL/1 that appeared in the early 1960's. Niklaus Wirth is claimed to have started developing Pascal in 1968, with a first implementation appearing on a CDC 6000 series computer in 1970.
| | Curiously enough, the C language did not appear until 1972. C sought to serve quite different needs to Pascal. C was designed as a high level language that still provided the low level access that assembly languages gave. Pascal was designed for the development of structured, maintainable applications.
| | The 1970's | | In 1975, Wirth teamed up with Jensen to produce the definitive Pascal reference book "Pascal User Manual and Report". Wirth moved on from Pascal in 1977 to work on Modula - the successor to Pascal.
| | The 1980's | | In 1982 ISO Pascal appears. The big event is in November 1983, when Turbo Pascal is released in a blaze of publicity. Turbo Pascal reaches release 4 by 1987. Turbo Pascal excelled on speed of compilation and execution, leaving the competition in its wake.
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From Turbo Pascal to Delphi | | Delphi, Borland's powerful Windows© and Linux© programming development tool first appeared in 1995. It derived from the Turbo Pascal© product line.
| | As the opposition took heed of Turbo Pascal, and caught up, Borland took a gamble on an Object Oriented version, mostly based on the Pascal object orientation extensions. The risk paid off, with a lot of the success due to the thought underlying the design of the IDE (Integrated Development Environent), and the retention of fast compilation and execution.
| | This first version of Delphi was somewhat limited when compared to today's heavyweights, but succeeded on the strength of what it did do. And speed was certainly a key factor. Delphi went through rapid changes through the 1990's.
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Delphi version 7 | | From that version 1, Borland has now reached version 7, a stepping stone away from the rival Microsoft© Net architecture, based on their rival to Delphi - Visual Basic. Delphi remains, in the opinion of the author, the best development tool for stand alone Windows and Linux applications. Pascal is a cleaner and much more disciplined language than Basic, and adapted much better to Object Orientation than Basic, but Borland probably need to move fast to bridge the gap to .Net.
| | It is unfortunate that Microsoft once again attempt to monopolise computing - Delphi deserves to survive the twists and turns of fate, if only because of its quality, speed and consistency. |
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© Neil Moffatt Delphi Basic. 2002,2003. All rights reserved.