February 14, 2007
Delphi was officially launched 12 years ago, today. Here is some material from my 10th birthday page.
Delphi was officially launched 12 years ago, on Valentine Day (the legend tells this was a Valentine present for VB, more probably it was because of the SD Conference the launch was part of). Two years ago, I build a rich web page with material from the time. Here you can find my Delphi 10th Birthday page.
There are two picture in the page I'd actually share on the blog. The first is the invitation to the launch party:
The second is an image of the two beta floppies I still have (I recycled all of the others!), from two different early beta rounds of Wasabi. Later betas were delivered on CD. (Yes, I know my NDA said I could not say I was on the beta, but that was 12 years ago... and my 1,500 pages book getting out soon after the product somewhat proves I had some information on it):
As much as you can complain with Borland/CodeGear about slips in the recent years, it is not very common to have a fully working and updated product (see the leak I received yesterday) after 12 years. How many other development tools for Windows of the same period are still there, supported and in wide use? How many programming languages of 12 years ago do you keep using?
Happy Birthday to Delphi... and to its R&D Team!
posted by
marcocantu @ 7:36PM | 1 Comments
[0 Pending]
12 Years of Delphi
I'm so glad the Powers-that-Be at Borland decided not
to sell-off Delphi! I have been a software developer
for 5 years, coming to the industry in a round-about
way. I was a professional oboist in a symphony
orchestra for a decade, when lung problems forced a
career change. I went back to school to get an IT
degree, studying client/server development using VB 6
and C++. When I got a job with the State of Ohio,
Delphi 5 was the official development platform. Once
I became familiar with Delphi, I quickly began to
become quite proficient with it. We migrated up
through Delphi 6, 7 & 8. I believe I could make
Delphi do just about anything I want it to do! I've
used Delphi to develop complex n-tier client/server
applications, ActiveX controls, multi-threaded
applications and multi-threaded Dll's. I've even used
Delphi as a middle tier data provider between a VB6
application I inherited from a contractor, and a
mainframe DB2 database. We had an old DB2 client at
the time, that wasn't compatible with ADO, so the VB6
app couldn't get data back from our mainframe DB2
databases. So, I developed an entire layer of multi-
threaded Dll's with Delphi 7 that connected to the
database and ran queries, passing the information
back to the VB6 application. My Delphi Dll's were
running 8 queries simultaneously using multi-
threading. The end users were thrilled with the
results, and are still using this VB6 - Delphi 7 -
DB2 system to this day.
Unfortunately, the management here has decided that
Delphi will no longer be our development platform of
choice, preferring instead to go with IBM
WebSphere/Rational Application Developer and C#. This
decision broke my heart, as I have grown to really
love Delphi, and feel I could use it to solve just
about any business problem, and provide almost any
business functionality a user could ask for. I still
continue to use Delphi in my spare time, whenever
friends ask me to develop solutions for them outside
of work. I hope one day we will return to using
Delphi, as I think it is a great tool for software
development, and can compete with any other tool out
there on the market today.
John M. Yount
State of Ohio ODJFS MIS
Comment by John M. Yount
[yountj@odjfs.state.oh.us]
on March 14, 16:29
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