There are a couple of telltale signs for Delphi in older apps: one is the use of TBitBtn control which adds an image to the buttons, the other is the use of ico

There are a couple of telltale signs for Delphi in older apps: one is the use of TBitBtn control which adds an image to the buttons, the other is the use of icons in menus. While both can be done via "raw" Win32 (or MFC), they are much more cumbersome whereas with Delphi it is done by simply picking an icon from the visual designer - especially for the button one since Windows does not have a control like that (it is a custom control by Delphi). In general my first thought whenever i saw a GUI with lots of icons at the time was that it was made using Delphi. Other toolkits added this sort of functionality so it doesn't look as out of place nowadays, but especially icons on buttons was kind of a Borland sign. In Win3.1 times it was even more apparent since Borland OWL had its own sort of "theme" for dialogs that had a textured and chiseled look with large 3D controls, so these apps stood out more. This was toned down in 32bit versions of OWL though it still used custom controls (check the button shape here[0] and how it looks a bit off compared to other buttons). Also Borland had a tendency to make their own icons for stuff that other programs used standardized icons for, often with very different symbols which also made them stand out and look weird. For example in the screenshot i linked at the first two icons are for open and save and the bolt icon is for running - those are from OWL. In Delphi the save was different (but still not a floppy) and the new and open icons were identical, a shining page of paper, except the open had words on it. Their "undo" icon was a red circle with a crossed line that in other apps would be something like "delete". Also FWIW i noticed that Neverwinter Nights' editor was made in Borland C++ Builder (i wrote the linked post) because the arrow icons used in it (visible in the screenshot in the post below the 3d viewport) are straight out of Borland C++ Builder. Though Bioware did make their own icons for other stuff. Again, nowadays these things do not stand out much, but back in the 90s/early 2000s when the Windows world was more uniform and developers did care about making applications that had the "Win9x" look they did. [0] https://i.imgur.com/0KqRLuA.png https://i.imgur.com/0KqRLuA.png