http://blogs.borland.com/AndersIvner/

Borland

(Borland Software Corporation, Cupertino, CA, www.borland.com) A software company founded as Borland International in 1983 by Philippe Kahn. The company is noted for its language and development products. It also popularized the desktop accessory for DOS PCs with its Sidekick program. With its Turbo Pascal, Borland moved Pascal out of the academic halls into a commercial product, and its Turbo C became an industry standard for DOS. Borland C++ and Delphi have been widely used for developing Windows applications, and its JBuilder environment for Java is very popular.

The company acquired the Paradox database in 1987 and dBASE in 1991, making it the leader in PC database software in the early 1990s. It later sold Paradox to Corel. In 1995, Kahn resigned as president, but remained as chairman. In 1998, Borland changed its name to Inprise Corporation in recognition of its focus on "integrating the enterprise." In 2001, it changed it back to Borland.

Philippe Kahn

Borland's founder was a notable personality in the early days of personal computing and led the company into some very successful ventures. (Image courtesy of Borland Software Corporation.)

Borland Software Corporation is a software company headquartered in California. NASDAQ: BORL It was founded by Philippe Kahn in 1983. It is best known for its software development tools, especially the Turbo Pascal programming tool that has evolved into today's Delphi. The company also produces application lifecycle management tools and sells consulting and education services.

History

The 1980s: Foundations

The Borland name (but not the company which exists today) started with a small company in Ireland. Three Danish citizens, Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, and Mogens Glad founded Borland Ltd. in August 1981 to develop products for the CP/M operating system using the name of an off-the-shelf company.^[1] After their products were exhibited at the CP/M-82 show in San Francisco, the company went bankrupt.

The company which would eventually become known as "Borland International," MIT ("Market in Time"), was founded in California in 1982 by Philippe Kahn. MIT had done some consulting work for Borland Ltd. and was owed $7,500. When MIT asked Kahn's company to change it's name, he acquired the rights to the "Borland" name from the bankruptcy court. Kahn took Borland public on the London Stock Exchange in 1986. A secondary stock offering on NASDAQ happened in 1988. The company's personnel then included Philippe Kahn as CEO, Chairman, and President, and Spencer Ozawa as Vice President Operations in the US. Later personnel included Marie Bourget as CFO and Gregor Freund as Director of European Operations.

Borland developed a series of well-regarded software development tools. Their first product was Turbo Pascal, using the compiler developed by Anders Hejlsberg. 1984 saw the launch of SideKick, a time organization, notebook and calculator utility, notable for being a Terminate and Stay Resident (TSR) program.

In 1987 Borland purchased Wizard Systems and incorporated portions of the Wizard C technology into Turbo C. Bob Jarvis, the author of Wizard C became a Borland employee. Turbo C was released on 18 May 1987 and an estimated 100,000 copies were shipped in the first month of its release.

In September 1987 Borland purchased Ansa-Software including their Paradox (version 2.0) database management tool. Richard Schwartz, CEO of Ansa became Borland's CTO.

The Quattro Pro spreadsheet was launched in 1989 with, at the time, a notable improvement and charting capabilities. Lotus development, under the leadership of Jim Manzi sued Borland for copyright infringement. The litigation brought forward Borland's open standards position as opposed to Lotus' closed approach. Borland, under Philippe Kahn's leadership took a position of principle and announced that they would defend against Lotus' legal position and "fight for programmer's rights".^{[citation needed]} After 6 years of litigation Borland's position got validated by the Supreme Court of the United States and Lotus lost the case.

Additionally, Borland was known for its practical and creative approach towards software piracy and intellectual property (IP), introducing its "Borland no-nonsense license agreement." This allowed the developer/user to utilize its products "just like a book"; he or she was allowed to make multiple copies of a program, as long as only one copy was in use at any point in time.

Borland also offered the full source code to many of its products, including editors, spreadsheets, chess games, and database engines.

The 1990s: Rise and change

In September 1991 Borland purchased Ashton-Tate, bringing the dBase and InterBase databases to the house, in an all stock transaction. Competition with Microsoft was fierce. Microsoft used its dominance in opearting systems to shake Borland up. Microsoft launched the competing database Microsoft Access and bought the dBase clone FoxPro in 1992, undercutting Borland's prices. Microsoft was focused on Borland and it must be noted that today Borland is the only company still standing among Microsoft's competitors at that time: Software Publishing, WordPerfect, Lotus and many others are all gone.

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. Microsoft used the same tactics as they did with spreadsheets, word processors, browsers and other software components.

A change in market conditions contributed to Borland's fall from prominence. In the 1980's, companies had few people who understood the growing personal computer phenomenon, and so most technical people were given free rein to purchase whatever software they thought they needed. Borland had done an excellent job marketing to those with a highly technical bent. By the mid-1990's, however, companies were beginning to ask what the return was on the investment they had made in this loosely controlled PC software buying spree. Company executives were starting to ask questions that were hard for technical folks to answer, and so corporate standards began to be created. This required new kinds of marketing and support materials from software vendors, but Borland remained focused on quality and software craftsmanship, which unfortunately seemed to matter less in a changed market. Rival software company Microsoft did a much better job of recognizing the changing market and shipping "adequate" solution that corporations were seeking and edging out Borland using their dominance with operating systems.

In October 1994, Borland sold Quattro Pro to Novell for $140 Million in cash, repositioning the company on its core software development tools.

Philippe Kahn and the Borland board came to a disagreement on how to focus the company, and the Borland board of directors fired Kahn as CEO, President and Chairman of Borland, a position he had held for 12 years, in January 1995.^[2] Kahn remained on Borland board until November 7, 1996, when he resigned from that position.^[3] Borland named Gary Wetsel as CEO, but he resigned in July 1996. William F. Miller was interim CEO until September of that year, when Whitney G. Lynn became interim president and CEO.

The Delphi 1 rapid application development (RAD) environment was launched in 1995, under the leadership of Anders Hejlsberg.

The Inprise years, and name changes

On November 25, 1996, Del Yocam was hired as Borland CEO and Chairman.

In 1997, Borland sold Paradox to Corel. In November 1997, Borland acquired Visigenic, a middleware company that was focused on implementations of CORBA.

On April 29, 1998, Borland refocused its efforts on targeting enterprise applications development, and went through a name change to Inprise Corporation (the name came from the slogan Integrating the Enterprise). The idea was to integrate Borland's tools, Delphi, [[C++Builder]], and JBuilder with enterprise environment software, including Visigenic's implementations of CORBA, Visibroker for C++ and Java, and the new emerging product, Application Server.

For a number of years (both before and during the Inprise name) Borland suffered from serious financial losses and very poor public image. When the name was changed to Inprise, many thought Borland had gone out of business.

dBase was sold in 1999.

In 1999, in the middle of Borland's identity crisis, Dale L. Fuller replaced CEO Del Yocam. At this time Fuller's title was "interim president and CEO." The "interim" was dropped a few years later.

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 and it became clear that there was really no strategic fit.

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. The name Inprise was abandoned.

Under the Borland name and a new management team headed by President and CEO Dale L. Fuller, a now-smaller and profitable Borland refocused 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.

Plans to spin off the InterBase division as a separate company were abandoned after Borland and the people who were to run the new company could not agree on terms for the separation. With the reenergized division under new management, Borland stopped open source releases of InterBase and has developed and sold new versions at a fast pace.

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. As of the 2005 release, C#Builder, Delphi for Win32, and Delphi for .NET have been combined into a single IDE called "Borland Developer Studio" (though the combined IDE is still popularly known as "Delphi"). 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 tool publisher Starbase, makers of the StarTeam configuration management tool and the CaliberRM requirements management tool. The latest releases of JBuilder and Delphi integrate these tools to give developers a broader set of tools for development.

The rounded-out set of product offerings legitimized Borland's new claim to the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) market, with tools spanning the software development chain from requirements, through design and development, to testing and deployment. In 2004 Borland rolled out its Software Delivery Optimization (SDO) marketing tagline, pitching the idea that SDO encompassed ALM in addition to higher-level software manufacturing concepts like portfolio management and estimation tools.

Former CEO Dale Fuller resigned in July 2005 but remained on the board of directors. Former COO Scott Arnold took the title of interim president and chief executive officer until November 8, 2005, when it was announced that Tod Nielsen would take over as CEO effective November 9, 2005.

In October 2005, Borland acquired Legadero, in order to add its IT Management and Governance (ITM&G) suite, called Tempo, to the Borland product line.

On February 8 2006 Borland announced the divestiture of their IDE division, including Delphi, JBuilder, and InterBase. At the same time they announced the planned acquisition of Segue Software, a maker of software test and quality tools, in order to concentrate on Application Lifecycle Management (ALM).

On March 20 2006 Borland said that it had acquired Gauntlet Systems, a provider of technology that screens software under development for quality and security.

Products

Current products

Borland's current product line includes:

• [[C++Builder]]
• CaliberRM
• Delphi
• JBuilder
• Optimizeit Suite
• InterBase
• JDataStore
• Borland Enterprise Studio, for C++, Mobile and Java
• Borland Enterprise Server
• StarTeam
• Together

Old software, no longer actively sold

Programming tools

• CodeWright
• C#Builder (Now part of Delphi)
• Kylix
• Turbo Pascal
• Turbo Assembler
• Turbo Debugger
• Turbo Profiler
• Turbo C
• Turbo BASIC
• Turbo Prolog
• [[Turbo C++]]
• [[Borland C++]]
• Object Vision
• Turbo Modula-2

Utilities

• SideKick
• SuperKey

Applications

• Reflex
• Sprint
• Quattro Pro
• Paradox
• dBase

Notes

1. ^ Intersimone
2. ^ Kellner, Krey, Jeffers, Parks
3. ^ Borland press release

References

• Borland (1996-11-07). Kahn Resigns as Borland Director — Cites Increasing Demands of New Business. Press release. URL accessed on 2006-04-21

• David Intersimone. Inprise Corporation - Integrating the Enterprise. Borland - A Little History of the Name.

• Jeffers, Michelle, "Getting Chance To Dance", Forbes. URL accessed on 2006-04-21.

• Kellner, Tomas. Survivor. Fortune. URL accessed on 30 August, 2005.

• Krey, Michael, "Borland Founder Kahn Focuses On Sending Photos Over Cell Phones", Investor's Business Daily. URL accessed on 2006-04-21.

• Parks, Bob (October, 2000). Wired Magazine, The Big Picture - Borland International Inc.'s Philippe Kahn. URL accessed on 20 April, 2006.

External links

• Borland Software Corporation.
• Borland Developer Network.
• Borland Code Central.
• David Intersimone. Will The Real Frank Borland Please Stand Up?. Borland History.
• David Intersimone. Inprise Corporation - Integrating the Enterprise. Borland - A Little History of the Name.

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Summary
Pragmatic Programmers Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas talk with Bill Venners about maintenance programming, the DRY principle, code generators and orthogonal systems, and a story about one highly coupled control system: the helicopter.

Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas are the Pragmatic Programmers, recognized internationally as experts in the development of high-quality software. Their best-selling book of software best practices, The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master (Addison-Wesley, 1999), is filled with practical advice on a wide range of software development issues. They also authored Programming Ruby: A Pragmatic Programmer's Guide (Addison-Wesley, 2000), and helped to write the now famous Agile Manifesto.

In this interview, which is being published in ten weekly installments, Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas discuss many aspects of software development:

• In Part I. Don't Live with Broken Windows, they discuss the importance of software craftsmanship and the importance of staying on top of the small problems in your projects.
• In this installment, they discuss the importance of keeping your system orthogonal, and the real meaning the DRY, or Don't Repeat Yourself, principle.

All Programming is Maintenance Programming

Bill Venners: You say in your book, The Pragmatic Programmer (Addison-Wesley, 1999), that "programmers are constantly in maintenance mode." Why?

Dave Thomas: All programming is maintenance programming, because you are rarely writing original code. If you look at the actual time you spend programming, you write a bit here and then you go back and make a change. Or you go back and fix a bug. Or you rip it out altogether and replace it with something else. But you are very quickly maintaining code even if it's a brand new project with a fresh source file. You spend most of your time in maintenance mode. So you may as well just bite the bullet and say, "I'm maintaining from day one." The disciplines that apply to maintenance should apply globally.

Andy Hunt: It's only the first 10 minutes that the code's original, when you type it in the first time. That's it.

The DRY Principle

Bill Venners: What's the DRY principle?

Dave Thomas: Don't Repeat Yourself (or DRY) is probably one of the most misunderstood parts of the book.

Bill Venners: How is DRY misunderstood and what is the correct way to understand it?

Dave Thomas: Most people take DRY to mean you shouldn't duplicate code. That's not its intention. The idea behind DRY is far grander than that.

DRY says that every piece of system knowledge should have one authoritative, unambiguous representation. Every piece of knowledge in the development of something should have a single representation. A system's knowledge is far broader than just its code. It refers to database schemas, test plans, the build system, even documentation.

Given all this knowledge, why should you find one way to represent each feature? The obvious answer is, if you have more than one way to express the same thing, at some point the two or three different representations will most likely fall out of step with each other. Even if they don't, you're guaranteeing yourself the headache of maintaining them in parallel whenever a change occurs. And change will occur. DRY is important if you want flexible and maintainable software.

The problem is: how do you represent all these different pieces of knowledge only once? If it's just code, then you can obviously organize your code so you don't repeat things, with the help of methods and subroutines. But how do you handle things like database schemas? This is where you get into other techniques in the book, like using code generation tools, automatic build systems, and scripting languages. These let you have single, authoritative representations that then generate non-authoritative work products, like code or DDLs (data description languages).

Page 1 of 3  >>

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