In a previous life, I used to do some fairly heavy drinking with Preben Madsen, who co-founded and was the CEO of PolyData, the Danish company where Anders Hegl

In a previous life, I used to do some fairly heavy drinking with Preben Madsen, who co-founded and was the CEO of PolyData, the Danish company where Anders Heglsberg developed PolyPascal that Borland OEM'ed as Turbo Pascal. According to himself, Preben was the one who convinced Anders Heglsberg to dump Algol for Pascal. They were doing really well with the royalties from Borland, and the highlight of Preben's story is when he went to a Porsche dealer to trade his BMW for a 928 (as I recall). The dealer would not offer him a good enough trade-in price for the BMW, until Preben suggested that he would just buy two Porsches instead of one. I am sure today's crypto-bros can tell even more impressive stories, but for mid-80s Denmark that one was actually quite above average. Unfortunately, the money that PolyData made on Turbo Pascal was all wasted trying to enter the ERP business with a system named Albatross that even IBM viewed as a serious competitor to their IBM Navigator system at one point. However, at years' end reporting, a bug in Albatross would cause all the financial records to get chewed up, which made the system very hard to sell after that. The Albatross disaster caused PolyData to eventually go under, and Heglsberg left PolyData to go work for Borland in the US. After PolyData, Preben started a small PC games distribution company called PolyMedia, and, as I was a (very young man) in the games business in the mid 90s myself, I would always bump into him in London at the bi-annual ECTS computer trade show, where we would go out for dinner and get very drunk, and he would share his many stories of past fame & fortune.