4 ms·
I love reading about the history around legendary companies like this. I was an avid Turbo Pascal user starting in 1990 or so. This sent me into a rabbit hole o
by atombender 4y ago
I love reading about the history around legendary companies like this. I was an avid Turbo Pascal user starting in 1990 or so. This sent me into a rabbit hole of research.
I thought I knew a lot about Borland's history, but what I didn't know was that the original team left Borland in 1987 to form JPI (Jensen & Partners), headquartered in London, taking a bunch of in-progress code with them that they bought from Borland for $1.7m. JPI made a range of development tools called TopSpeed, which I remember hearing about back then. Unlike Borland's language tools, TopSpeed was a unified compiler backend with a frontend compiler for each language.
JPI eventually merged with Clarion, which made a "4GL" IDE with its own crude Pascal-esque programming language that at one point competed with Microsoft Access, as well as with database-focused IDEs like Microsoft's Visual Basic and Borland's own Delphi. Clarion still exists, though it's now owned by a company called SoftVelocity, and is built on .NET, and looks like it's barely on life support.
Of the original Borland founders, I don't know what happened to Niels Jensen, but Ole Henriksen [1] started a business that designs technology for prefab "pod" houses, and Mogens Glad [2] became a movie producer.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/ole-henriksen-a731323a/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/ole-henriksen-a731323a/
[2] https://www.linkedin.com/in/mglad/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/mglad/
- mrlonglong 4y agoI actually worked with TopSpeed Modula-2 to develop software for air traffic control training simulators in the late 90s. Interesting language, wouldn't mind finding a copy to play with in my MS-DOS VM some day.
- atombender 4y agoI found a version of Topspeed Modula 2 from 1993 [1], which is after the JPI-Clarion merger. Someone also reverse-engineered Turbo Modula-2 [2], which apparently was the original codebase. [1] https://vetusware.com/download/Topspeed%20Modula%202%203.10/?id=3783 https://vetusware.com/download/Topspeed%20Modula%202%203.10/... [2] https://github.com/Oric4ever/Turbo-Modula-2-Reloaded https://github.com/Oric4ever/Turbo-Modula-2-Reloaded
- mrlonglong 4y agoThanks, I'm playing with that on my MS-DOS VM now.
- pantulis 4y agoThe TopSpeed Modula-2 compiler was fast and the IDE was pretty interesting, you could customize almost anything, far beyond what the Turbos from Borland offered. Also it included a demo that run concurrent coroutines on a regular 8086 computer, I think it was a traffic simulator. Pretty cool stuff!
- MrMan 4y agoclarion was good
- fallous 4y agoBorland seemed to be in flux in the year or two prior to the split. Turbo Prolog was hyped and then seemed to disappear (although I'm pretty sure it shipped a version or two), Turbo Pascal was advertised for the then-new Amiga 1000 and never shipped. It's hard to understate how critical Borland was in the shift from the BASIC era of home computing for many users and inexperienced programmers in the 80s and early 90s.
- eterps 4y ago> Turbo Pascal was advertised for the then-new Amiga 1000 and never shipped. Heh, I just found the product announcement here: http://www.museo8bits.es/anuncios/TurboPascal.jpg http://www.museo8bits.es/anuncios/TurboPascal.jpg
- ikeserbestian 4y agoI didn't know this, nice to dream if there was a successful and widespread Turbo Pascal for Amiga how things escalating differently. Like an early Delphi maybe. Basic never made a real hit on Amiga platform, probably Amos was the only product resembling kind of Turbo Pascal and widely utilized by users but it was too shallow and slow for the era.