Borland - Turbo Pascal and the Big Four years

The name has a story of its own. The American company was first called MIT, for Market In Time; a letter from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology prompted a rebrand, and on legal advice the founders took the name of a small bankrupt Irish customer, Borland. Its first product was Turbo Pascal, released in 1983 and developed by Anders Hejlsberg, whose compiler had been sold in Scandinavia as Compas Pascal. Kahn's idea was to package editor, compiler and everything needed to produce a program in one fast, cheap toolkit and sell it by direct mail for $49.95, bypassing retailers and resellers at a time when professional tools cost hundreds. Sidekick, an early terminate-and-stay-resident utility, followed in 1984; by 1985 the legend of Turbo Pascal had, in one reviewer's words, reached mythic proportions, and firms made plans in marketing meetings to become the next Borland.

Forrester Research counted Borland, with Analytica's Reflex database bought in 1985, among the Big Four of personal computer software beside Ashton-Tate, Lotus and Microsoft. Fiscal 1987 revenue was $29.2 million; that September Borland bought Ansa-Software and its Paradox database, and in 1989 it launched the Quattro Pro spreadsheet, which drew Lotus Development's copyright suit over look and feel, Lotus v. Borland. In September 1991 Borland bought Ashton-Tate in an all-stock transaction, bringing dBASE and InterBase into the house.

The Ashton-Tate merger was, by the encyclopaedia's account, a large part of the downfall: the portfolio was weak, with no provision for the GUI environment of Windows, almost all product lines were discontinued, consolidating duplicate offices was costly, and dBASE for Windows shipped so late that the developer community had moved on. Layoffs in 1993 were the third in five years. Kahn and the board disagreed on focus and he resigned in January 1995, the year Delphi 1, Hejlsberg's rapid application development environment, was launched. Hejlsberg later built C# and .NET at Microsoft.

In April 1998 Borland International announced it had become Inprise Corporation, a name so unlike the old one that many thought the company had gone out of business; the Borland name came back. On 8 February 2006 it announced the divestiture of its development tools division, Delphi, JBuilder and InterBase, to concentrate on application life-cycle management, formed the CodeGear subsidiary that November, and on 7 May 2008 sold CodeGear to Embarcadero Technologies for an expected $23 million plus $7 million in receivables. On 6 May 2009 Micro Focus announced it would buy what remained for $75 million, $1.50 a share, and completed the purchase in late July 2009. Micro Focus went to OpenText in 2023.

The lesson the record keeps is the one the price tag teaches. A compiler at $49.95 by mail order did to development tools what Novell's at-cost Ethernet cards did to networking hardware in the same decade: it made the professional's instrument cheap enough for the student, and the students became the profession. Pascal, Turbo Pascal and dBASE have their own glossary entries; Ashton-Tate and Nantucket, the Clipper company, their own records.