15 ms·

Why did Borland ignore the Macintosh market?

135 points by SeenNotHeard 2y ago

Suppafly 2y ago
"They didn't" pretty easy answer. Also the idea that they lost "even though their products were technically superior to Microsoft's offerings" is sorta unsupported and is obviously subjective.
- JohnFen 2y ago
  Borland made the best dev tools in their day, but they sorta lost the edge early in the Builder run and other tools became more desirable. At least, that's why I stopped using them. I don't know about Mac support. I did Apple development during those days as well, but I didn't use Borland tools for that, I used CodeWarrior.
  - Someone 2y ago
    > I did Apple development during those days as well, but I didn't use Borland tools for that, I used CodeWarrior. Are you sure “those days” were the same days? Turbo Pascal for Mac was released in 1986 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal#Turbo_Pascal_for_Macintosh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal#Turbo_Pascal_for_...), CodeWarrior in 1994 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CodeWarrior#Release https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CodeWarrior#Release). By that time, I think Borland already had left the Mac market.
    - JohnFen 2y ago
      Yes, you're absolutely right. The past starts to all blend together.
  - Suppafly 2y ago
    I think CodeWarrior was just the superior IDE for anything Mac back in the day. I wasn't a mac guy, but I recall it basically being the only option my buddies would consider back then.
    - JohnFen 2y ago
      CodeWarrior was really great. I think it's one of the best IDEs to be produced to this day.
      - nobleach 2y ago
        Few things unlock my late 90's programming nostalgia like hearing "CodeWarrior". "Eiffel" is a close second. Kylix is also on that list.
        com 2y ago
        Whatever happened to Eiffel? Just left behind by the March of Java?
        pjmlp 2y ago
        Yes, and no, they were left by FOSS programming languages and modern devs not wanting to pay for their tools. Just like Borland/Embarcadero, they now live from enterprises with deep pockets. https://www.eiffel.com/ https://www.eiffel.com/
  - pulvinar 2y ago
    LightSpeed C, later renamed THINK C, had the Mac market sewn up before CodeWarrior. They had an excellent hypertext help built in, before web browsers. They were bought by Symantec, added C++, and then got beat out by Metrowerks.
  - rcarmo 2y ago
    Yep. I used ThinkC and ThinkPascal besides the MPW toolchain. They were just a nicer fit.
- pkphilip 2y ago
  Having used both MS and Borland products during the late 90s and early 2000s, Borland tools were definitely far superior from the standpoint of ease of use, time it takes to develop serious applications etc. The primary advantage of the Borland's tools apart form itse its ease of use and was its very interesting component architecture which allowed for very easy development of third-party components and so many high quality third-party components were available free or at low cost. While this was happening MS got lost in the bushes trying to get ActiveX, COM etc to be the bridge for component inter-usability but it didn't come close to the ease of development of components in Delphi, CppBuilder etc. The issue with Borland was the poor quality of management after their founder left. They tried to get into the Application Development Lifecycle space, bought up a lot of companies in that space and increased the cost of their dev tools to the point that it was no longer affordable to smaller dev shops who were their primary customers. This problem hasn't gone away. Embarcadero still has ridiculous pricing for their products even though now they have a very stripped down IDE which can be used for free till you hit the USD 5000/year revenue limit.
  - jajko 2y ago
    We used both at university, for designing UI and corresponding events Borland's dev studio was easily 10x faster to design if your UI was a bit more complex, especially if you are not very familiar with whole ecosystem. MS design of their stuff in those years was often... shitty on multiple levels to be polite, ie MFC comes to mind, over-complicated for no good benefit. People jumped to literally anything else if they could, be it Borland for C/C++, Java had much saner object-oriented design model too (which could be compiled to native code with native UI if needed, since their default stuff didn't look the best).
    - pkphilip 2y ago
      True. You were at least 10x more productive in Delphi than VC++
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Their products were, and still are in many ways tehcnically superior to Microsoft offerings. Back in the day, Visual C++ 6.0 was when we finally migrated into Microsoft development tools, and I used Borland tools for ages before that, starting with Turbo Basic in 1990. Additionally to this day, Microsoft doesn't have anything on the C++ front that can compete with C++ Builder for RAD GUI development, MFC is a fossil, while WinUI with C++/WinRT is a bad joke.
  - actionfromafar 2y ago
    Visual C++ 6.0 was still very inferior even as an IDE, but it was okay so it won sort of by default. But for GUI building, Borland was great.
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      Was and still is, I don't really grasp what kind of Stockholm syndrome goes by at WinDev, that they finally had something that could match against C++ Builder (UWP with C++/CX), only to kill it via a mini-riot, replacing it with a development experience akin to doing ATL with Visual C++ 6.0. If only IDL tooling, and related C++ code generation wasn't frozen in time, just like it first came in Visual Studio almost 30 years ago, besides updating the actual language to MIDL 3.0, that is. And now while WinUI 3.0 folks tell the story that you can use C++ with WinUI / WinAppSDK, what they don't tell is the castastrophic state of C++/WinRT tooling in Visual Studio, that there are no plans to improve it past C++17, and the only thing happening ot its repo is bug fixes. Stay away from it as much as possible, and using it with C# and CsWinRT is not much better, as many errors are surfaced as HRESULT exceptions, and you need to actually single step into C++/WinRT code to actually find out the real cause.
  - em500 2y ago
    People at Microsoft would probably agree. In 1996 they hired Borland's chief engineer Anders Hejlsberg, who designed Turbo Pascal and Delphi at Borland, and C# and Typescript at Microsoft.
    - eschaton 2y ago
mannyv 2y ago
I used all the major mac tools: think c, codewarrior, and mpw. I think the money just wasn't there. The PC market was the corporate market, and they were the ones who had lots of developers.
- acdha 2y ago
  Both lots of developers and willingness to provide regular revenue. The indie developers would hang onto an expensive purchase as long as they could between upgrades since it was often their second greatest business expense behind the comparatively much more expensive hardware.
pjmlp 2y ago
Mostly because outside US it was nonexistent. In Portugal we only had a single distributor in Lisbon, Interlog, that we would need to visit in person, or call in via ads in computer magazines, only to buy super expensive computers, versus the PC market alternative. For us, Apple only became relevant after NeXT's acquision gave it a 2nd life.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > Mostly because outside US it was nonexistent. It was also nonexistent within the US.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    … limited and crazy overpriced. The first Mac was an awesome demo but not able to do much because it only had 128k; within a few years people had shoehorned that demo into much cheaper machines (even had something like Plan 9's UI for Os-9 on the TRS-80 Color Computer) Meanwhile you had the Atari ST, Amiga, Sinclair QL on the low end with color graphics 68k machines against the still monochrome Mac. These were affordable, good for games and other media, and in principle more scalable than the PC and AT architectures of the time. A little later you got very powerful 68k machines running Unix from vendors like Sun Microsystems. I first saw a Mac 2 in college after I had used a Sun cluster with huge, mostly monochrome, monitors and was blown away by the refinement of the desktop (small monitor had something to do with it) but the price tag was insane. Some people swore by mac for desktop publishing, but the Suns had great software for that too.
    - chuckadams 2y ago
      That awesome demo was on a 512K Mac at that. Jobs had insisted on a stock 128K model but the engineers expanded it without telling him.
      - 2y ago
everfrustrated 2y ago
Borlands tools were mostly used by business professionals. Sure they sold at discount to students/ hobbyists etc but professionals were the core of their market. It wasn't cheap software. The Mac market (until very recently) was predominantly for home not business use.
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  On the other hand, Mac hardware was super expensive. Today Mac hardware commands a little premium but pre OS 9 the difference in price was huge. So Mac owners could not have been very price sensitive in general.
  - eschaton 2y ago
    A baseline Mac wasn’t any more expensive than the competition (IBM), it just wasn’t inexpensive like Commodore, Atari, and PC clones. Apple also had essentially the same price structure for decades, while PC clones raced to the bottom on both price and quality. And the Mac II was actually priced better than most competitive systems—because those competitive systems were 16MHz 68020/68881-based workstations from Apollo, HP, Tektronix, Sun, et al. In early 1987, a name-brand 16MHz 80386 system with 80387 was comparably priced, which is why most people buying PC clones didn’t get a 386 until 1990-91 or so, around when the 80486 (and 68040) came out.
    - usrusr 2y ago
      "wasn’t any more expensive than the competition (IBM)" In other words: no more expensive than the other thing nobody ever bought? The success of the PC did not lie in IBM selling large numbers.
  - cmrdporcupine 2y ago
    It fluctuated. During the first few years of the Mac era they were stupid expensive. In the later Scully & Amelio years they dropped in price a lot as the component prices in the 68k Macs became way cheaper, and they became fairly affordable esp if you could get an education (teacher or student) discount, which they were aggressive about. Still was not at all a common machine in people's homes.
black_13 2y ago
[dead]
seanhunter 2y ago
For one, you could use ucsd pascal for free on mac so turbo pascal would have struggled to get traction among learners and hobbyists. Source: used turbo pascal on pc at home and ucsd pascal on apple IIcs at school.
- eschaton 2y ago
  You used Apple Pascal on the Apple II, not the Mac, and it wasn’t actually free but a couple hundred dollars a seat. It was based on UCSD Pascal, as were many implementations at the time, but it was a commercial product and one used by many Apple II developers. Your school either licensed or pirated it for you to use. Apple didn’t even ship self-hosted assembly tools for the Mac until the Macintosh Development System later in 1984, and when Apple did ship Macintosh Pascal it was a learning environment with a (non-UCSD) bytecode interpreter rather than a native compiler with Toolbox access. That was still something most people used a Lisa for until after both the Mac 512 and the HD20 came out.
  - seanhunter 2y ago
    I definitely used ucsd pascal version II (not apple pascal, which came a bit later) on Apple II. Looking at this source[1], it looks like it both existed for Apple II and wasn't free so I must have assumed that incorrectly. I also realise I was talking about Apple II not mac. My assumption/point was that the market for apple pascal devs had been captured previously by the "power" of the UCSD p-system before the mac came along so borland figured they didn't have a chance. Personally I wasn't that much of a fan of ucsd pascal vs turbo pascal for reasons I can't remotely remember. I think ucsd pascal you could only do things in the "p-system" bytecode thing which meant it had a slightly more restrictive/pure pascal variant vs turbo pascal had some language extensions like being able to do dynamic memory allocation so you could make trees and linked lists and stuff that iirc you could'nt do very easily in vanilla/ucsd pascal. It's been a while so I may be misremembering. [1] https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1982-08/page/n193/mode/2up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1982-08/page/n193/... 15yo me didn't realise that using UCSD pascal made me one of the elite. My whole life may have gone differently had I known that.
drooopy 2y ago
In the 90s it would have been newsworthy if someone remembered the Macintosh market, not the other way around.
- acdha 2y ago
  They weren’t dominant but it wasn’t even remotely newsworthy to remember that entire industries like publishing, education, audio/video, science & medicine, etc. existed. Since PCs were starting from so far behind the industry had something of a chip on its shoulder and it was common to see print ad comparisons where they were showing how a PC was just as good for less money, where they’d list the optional components like a sound card and mouse not adding as much as the base difference.
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  Were you there? From the late 80s to mid-late 90s all my classrooms had Apple computers and Macs. Late 90s seemed to be the transition to "IBM compatible" PCs.
  - drooopy 2y ago
    I was there (and then) living across different European countries in the 90s and IBM compatibles were the de facto computing standard followed by niche products like the Amiga which had a dedicated following, mostly hobbyists. But for all intents and purposes the mac was just a zombie platform over here. The first Mac that I had ever seen was the original blue iMac.
  - kbolino 2y ago
    I was. There were lots of Apple computers, yes. There were not very many Macs, though. The labs full of IIe and IIgs gave way to PCs, with no era for Macs in between. There were never more than a handful of Macs around at all, and they were the cheaper ones (LC and low-end Performa). There was a small resurgence in schools with the first iMacs, but by then PC was solidly dominant. The iMacs weren't that popular with students, though, because they lacked floppy drives. Flash drives were still small and expensive, the cloud didn't exist yet, and CD-Rs weren't a good fit for small, short-lived, often-changed files.
bachmeier 2y ago
Back when I was taking programming classes in the early 90s, everything was done on "IBM compatible" PCs because of the job market. I remember one professor talking about how everyone that learned to program in high school did it on Apple computers, but said they had to switch because there were no professional programming jobs for Apple. The school had Macs, but those were for graphics-oriented classes, and they had Apples, but those were for word processing.
kopirgan 2y ago
Great company. Long long back bought their C++ compiler which came in those thick binders with a very well written guidebook on the language, OOP concept etc. Fun to read their " no nonsense licensing" legalese
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Most of their great stuff has been archived in bitsavers, if you want to review those manuals.
  - kopirgan 2y ago
    Thanks!
bsenftner 2y ago
Speaking as a person that worked on the original Mac OS, the "story" that the OS was originally based on Pascal is not really correct. It was written in Assembly, with the belief that later developers would be using Pascal, and so Apple wrote the developer facing Inside Macintosh with Pascal as the language used for the examples. However, as far as I know no major software houses seriously worked in Pascal on the Mac; C and Assembly were the kings during the 80's and continued with C/C++ during the 90's.
- nobleach 2y ago
  Adobe Photoshop? That was written in Pascal.
- _mlbt 2y ago
  Adobe Photoshop was originally written in Pascal. MacPaint was as well.
  - bsenftner 2y ago
    With a good amount of Assembly. Look at the source files: https://github.com/amix/photoshop https://github.com/amix/photoshop Even the Pascal files have assembly in them.
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      It goes both ways, it cannot be a feature in C, and something bad to point out in Pascal.
      - foobarian 2y ago
        The point is, back then you didn't end up writing nice software because your language was awesomer than other languages. You wrote nice software by escaping to assembly, so support for that was important for state of the art tools.
        2y ago
jmclnx 2y ago
AFAIK, the MACs at the time was all point and click. Building GUI applications is not easy. Borland's IDE was text base, making that a GUI may have been to expensive based upon the amount of $ that could be made. Also, most MAC people considered themselves Artists, not developers. Most individual developers (all) were hacking on DOS at the time. So that may have played into it too. To me, it is all about potential revenue vs expense.
- foobarian 2y ago
  I wonder how much games played a part. In my case, deep down all I wanted to do is just play games. Ataris and Amigas had nice games but at one point the PC just blew their doors off. The Mac was a sad non-contender you used in your print shop to design calendars.
- bluedino 2y ago
  I often wonder where the all-caps 'MAC' originated.
  - tjakab 2y ago
    My suspicion from early in my career is it was people that came from IT who just assumed that 'MAC' was an acronym for something, like pretty much everything else they dealt with, as opposed to the shortening of the proper noun 'Macintosh.'
  - p1mrx 2y ago
    Confusion with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_access_control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_access_control ?
JKCalhoun 2y ago
In fact the first programming I did on the Macintosh was using Borland's Turbo Pascal for the Mac. I took an introductory programming class at the University of Kansas. it taught us Pascal and it was a new language for me (having really only known BASIC, noodled with assembly). It was a bit surprising that the class used Macintosh's — these running a kind of "project-less" version of Turbo Pascal as I recall where you simply fed in your source file with ReadLn() and WriteLn() functions sprinkled throughout and observed the result in some kind of console window. I'm not sure if I was aware of THINK Pascal (or THINK C) at that time but when I soon after bought my first Macintosh (a Mac Plus) I went looking for software to program it and it happens that a professor was selling his copy of Turbo Pascal for the Macintosh. So perhaps it was serendipitous, but Turbo Pascal became my introduction to Mac programming. I stuck with it for perhaps a year or two before moving over to the richer THINK Pascal. (And later I migrated to THINK C to run with the big dogs — having to learn about pointers and C parameter passing was a right pain in the ass for this naive young coder). (By chance, I happened to be on a mini-quest recently to try to recover these old programs that I started and abandoned back in the 1980's. And I have come across my original Turbo Pascal floppies as well as some of the crude apps I tried creating with the tool.) As others have said, I suspect Borland jumped into the game early gambling that the Mac might be the Next Big Thing, bailed early too when it turned out that it was not (that of course would quickly be the IBM PC clone market).
- kristianp 2y ago
  Was it hard to create windowed Mac programs in Turbo Pascal? I imagine there were headers (in C parlance) you could import for that?
  - OnlyMortal 2y ago
    Pascal was a first class citizen. Indeed, quite alot of the original Mac was Pascal and 68k assembler. For example, strings were prefixed with a length byte as is popular in the Pascal world. Apple even shipped a Pascal compiler with their MPW Shell - a development environment. Personally, I used MPW C and 68k.
ubermonkey 2y ago
I had the vague sense at the time -- and, to be clear, I wasn't a Mac person until the late 1990s so it's before I knew anything about the platform -- that for reasons I never understood it was more difficult to write code for the pre-MacOS Macs actually ON those Macs. The other thing that may escape a modern reader is that the Mac timeline is really two eras: The original classic Mac era, with its Chicago-and-sepia look, and then a huge and stark transition to what was initially called OS X and is now called MacOS. They are entirely different systems, but people outside the Mac world often mistake the transition to something more like Win95 -> NT/XP. It's not that. It's way more. OS X is when the Mac got shiny to technical people, because it was (and is) based on FreeBSD, and even shipped (and ships) with a host of the sorts of tools you'd expect from a Linux distro. And it was introduced in a time when LAMP development was huge, so if you were in that world writing an interpreted language targeting MySQL and Apache it was EASIER to work on a Mac than it would've been to stay on Windows. So, sure, today we see lots of devs and even whole software companies standardizing on the Mac, but in 1995 this would have been unthinkable.
Joel_Mckay 2y ago
If I recall, it was mainly due to the market size, and to a lesser extent Apples xenophobic posturing toward 3rd party developer control. Information appliances like Mac are a streamlined workflow for Desktop Publishing, but are not intended to be repurposed in an arbitrary manner. For example, you would see a dozen choices for CAD or IDE solutions on PC, but there would only be 1 option that cost 1200% more on Mac (OS 7.5.3). Eventually the MacOS application/compiler options users had would slowly diversify under OSX/intel-cpu, but the M1/M2 architecture shift would drop again to burn down any progress people made opening the platform. The easy to cross-port GNU applications still cling to the underbelly of modern posix based MacOS, but you can guarantee it is an uphill battle to get anything deployed outside the Apple App store ecosystem build tree. Apples irrational need to monopolize their own ecosystem meant they always locked down their platform though obscurity and or DRM security. It is unfortunate Microsoft Windows 11 and Google Android still copied Apples worst design choices, as users had their control slowly stripped off hardware they purchased. Thus, most modern computer user interface design is just a sales funnel for App stores, and gentle racketeering. =3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFTyJDjfjG0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFTyJDjfjG0
- jen20 2y ago
  > to a lesser extent Apples xenophobic posturing toward 3rd party developer control. Classic MacOS didn't even have a first-party IDE. Everything was third-party. > but you can guarantee it is an uphill battle to get anything deployed outside the Apple App store ecosystem build tree. It's hard to even parse this sentence, to be frank, but any possible reading of it is nuts. It's trivial to install Nix on macOS and have basically every package available to you. Same with Brew, though it's less nice that way.
  - Joel_Mckay 2y ago
    It is OK, people wouldn't know what is missing if they never saw the alternative. "It's hard to even parse this sentence" Try to cross-compile something on modern MacOS, and handle the DRM signing on another platform. For example, you are still going to need an active Apple Developer account to run https://quasar.dev https://quasar.dev for MacOS/iOS targets, or users are going to incur a bit of hassle running your code. It is ok, most people have trouble understanding each other at first. =3
layer8 2y ago
Imagine if we had a Turbo Swift now.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Delphi, and Rem Objects has a Swift compiler. https://www.remobjects.com/elements/ https://www.remobjects.com/elements/
analog31 2y ago
I think the hurdle from a programming language to actually creating mac-like software was too great for Borland and for casual programmers. MS-DOS became where you could write and share ugly but useful programs. Hypercard changed that but it was too little too late and Apple didn't have its heart in supporting casual programming. Professional devs don't realize what a big deal Visual Basic was.
- bunderbunder 2y ago
  Professional devs at the time certainly did. Some thoroughly eye-watering percentage of business applications were written in VB. I'm still not sure that any modern tech has replaced the sheer "it doesn't need to be beautiful it just needs to be functional and inexpensive to build and maintain" power that we had with tools like Visual Basic. Nowadays I'm accustomed to multi-person teams needing months to build what a single skilled VB6 developer could bodge together in a couple weeks, but I still sometimes marvel at how we got from there to here without enterprise and B2B development shops calling foul along the way. Perhaps it's because they know they can cover any increase in development cost with the larger amount of money they can squeeze out of customers using modern SaaS subscription pricing schemes.
anticorporate 2y ago
As many people have said, it's only an interesting question if you don't have the context of Apple market share in the PC market, which spent over two decades between 1980 and the early 2000s in a state of almost constant decline. To me, that's the more interesting part here. Yes, everyone knows Apple is huge today, but many people apparently don't know how far from inevitable that was. If you had asked me in 2000 who would be the bigger company in 2024: Apple, Blockbuster, Toys "R" Us, or Enron, I'm not sure how I would have answered except that I'm positive I wouldn't have said Apple.
- burningChrome 2y ago
  >> Apple, Blockbuster, Toys "R" Us, or Enron This is such a great point. Blockbuster stores were so ubiquitous, and I never thought streaming would be a thing considering the state of the internet back in the late 90's, early aughts. Toys? Who thought a toy store would ever go bankrupt? And Enron were heralded as pioneers in the idea of buying commodities on demand and how this was going to change all kinds of different industries with their business model of how they sold their wares. Enron was considered light years ahead of companies in the energy sector. At the same point, Apple seemed to be, like you said, constantly failing, moving backwards, and essentially looked like it already had one foot in the grave when every other company was seemingly destined for a lifetime of success. Having experienced the rise and fall of all the companies you listed; I think a lot of people are unaware of how destabilizing the internet has been for companies who were unable to grasp how seismic the changes that were coming and didn't move fast enough to adapt. I think the real question is if someone other than Steve Jobs was running Apple, would they have gone the same way the companies you listed go as well?
  - zaidf 2y ago
    >I think the real question is if someone other than Steve Jobs was running Apple, would they have gone the same way the companies you listed go as well? John Sculley already answered this, no?
    - philistine 2y ago
nyrikki 2y ago
People forgot the Ashton-Tate merger, which destroyed Borland's internal culture and saddled it with products that were almost impossible to move to a WYSIWYG model. They were targeting both Windows and OS/2 for the GUI implementations they did deliver with much reduced budgets. Microsoft buying FoxPro and introducing preditory pricing also didn't help. Neither did MS sniping the Quattero team. Add in Philippe Kahn and the Borland board fighting on direction didn't help. The company simply was troubled and didn't have the resources to port anything besides Pascal, which as one of the teaching languages of the day, was easier to justify.
rbanffy 2y ago
I like to imagine they couldn't make a dent in the Mac market because their products were too ugly to appeal to Mac users. Sometimes I think I'm only half joking on that. Back then, making software run on more than one platform was much more painful than it is now. Not only were the range of features provided by the OS vastly different, it was common to write performance critical parts in assembly - which made them need to be almost completely rewritten (there were macro assemblers that made that slightly easier). Unix was heralded as "open" (not to be confused with open source) because it was less painful to port stuff and make it interoperate with other Unixes.
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isodev 2y ago
Maybe they could see the future and didn’t want to pay 30% of their revenue for nothing /s.

135 points by SeenNotHeard 2y ago

"They didn't" pretty easy answer. Also the idea that they lost "even though their products were technically superior to Microsoft's offerings" is sorta unsupported and is obviously subjective.

JohnFen 2y ago
Borland made the best dev tools in their day, but they sorta lost the edge early in the Builder run and other tools became more desirable. At least, that's why I stopped using them. I don't know about Mac support. I did Apple development during those days as well, but I didn't use Borland tools for that, I used CodeWarrior.
- Someone 2y ago
  > I did Apple development during those days as well, but I didn't use Borland tools for that, I used CodeWarrior. Are you sure “those days” were the same days? Turbo Pascal for Mac was released in 1986 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal#Turbo_Pascal_for_Macintosh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal#Turbo_Pascal_for_...), CodeWarrior in 1994 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CodeWarrior#Release https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CodeWarrior#Release). By that time, I think Borland already had left the Mac market.
  - JohnFen 2y ago
    Yes, you're absolutely right. The past starts to all blend together.
- Suppafly 2y ago
  I think CodeWarrior was just the superior IDE for anything Mac back in the day. I wasn't a mac guy, but I recall it basically being the only option my buddies would consider back then.
  - JohnFen 2y ago
    CodeWarrior was really great. I think it's one of the best IDEs to be produced to this day.
    - nobleach 2y ago
      Few things unlock my late 90's programming nostalgia like hearing "CodeWarrior". "Eiffel" is a close second. Kylix is also on that list.
      - com 2y ago
        Whatever happened to Eiffel? Just left behind by the March of Java?
        pjmlp 2y ago
        Yes, and no, they were left by FOSS programming languages and modern devs not wanting to pay for their tools. Just like Borland/Embarcadero, they now live from enterprises with deep pockets. https://www.eiffel.com/ https://www.eiffel.com/
- pulvinar 2y ago
  LightSpeed C, later renamed THINK C, had the Mac market sewn up before CodeWarrior. They had an excellent hypertext help built in, before web browsers. They were bought by Symantec, added C++, and then got beat out by Metrowerks.
- rcarmo 2y ago
  Yep. I used ThinkC and ThinkPascal besides the MPW toolchain. They were just a nicer fit.
pkphilip 2y ago
Having used both MS and Borland products during the late 90s and early 2000s, Borland tools were definitely far superior from the standpoint of ease of use, time it takes to develop serious applications etc. The primary advantage of the Borland's tools apart form itse its ease of use and was its very interesting component architecture which allowed for very easy development of third-party components and so many high quality third-party components were available free or at low cost. While this was happening MS got lost in the bushes trying to get ActiveX, COM etc to be the bridge for component inter-usability but it didn't come close to the ease of development of components in Delphi, CppBuilder etc. The issue with Borland was the poor quality of management after their founder left. They tried to get into the Application Development Lifecycle space, bought up a lot of companies in that space and increased the cost of their dev tools to the point that it was no longer affordable to smaller dev shops who were their primary customers. This problem hasn't gone away. Embarcadero still has ridiculous pricing for their products even though now they have a very stripped down IDE which can be used for free till you hit the USD 5000/year revenue limit.
- jajko 2y ago
  We used both at university, for designing UI and corresponding events Borland's dev studio was easily 10x faster to design if your UI was a bit more complex, especially if you are not very familiar with whole ecosystem. MS design of their stuff in those years was often... shitty on multiple levels to be polite, ie MFC comes to mind, over-complicated for no good benefit. People jumped to literally anything else if they could, be it Borland for C/C++, Java had much saner object-oriented design model too (which could be compiled to native code with native UI if needed, since their default stuff didn't look the best).
  - pkphilip 2y ago
    True. You were at least 10x more productive in Delphi than VC++
pjmlp 2y ago
Their products were, and still are in many ways tehcnically superior to Microsoft offerings. Back in the day, Visual C++ 6.0 was when we finally migrated into Microsoft development tools, and I used Borland tools for ages before that, starting with Turbo Basic in 1990. Additionally to this day, Microsoft doesn't have anything on the C++ front that can compete with C++ Builder for RAD GUI development, MFC is a fossil, while WinUI with C++/WinRT is a bad joke.
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  Visual C++ 6.0 was still very inferior even as an IDE, but it was okay so it won sort of by default. But for GUI building, Borland was great.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Was and still is, I don't really grasp what kind of Stockholm syndrome goes by at WinDev, that they finally had something that could match against C++ Builder (UWP with C++/CX), only to kill it via a mini-riot, replacing it with a development experience akin to doing ATL with Visual C++ 6.0. If only IDL tooling, and related C++ code generation wasn't frozen in time, just like it first came in Visual Studio almost 30 years ago, besides updating the actual language to MIDL 3.0, that is. And now while WinUI 3.0 folks tell the story that you can use C++ with WinUI / WinAppSDK, what they don't tell is the castastrophic state of C++/WinRT tooling in Visual Studio, that there are no plans to improve it past C++17, and the only thing happening ot its repo is bug fixes. Stay away from it as much as possible, and using it with C# and CsWinRT is not much better, as many errors are surfaced as HRESULT exceptions, and you need to actually single step into C++/WinRT code to actually find out the real cause.
- em500 2y ago
  People at Microsoft would probably agree. In 1996 they hired Borland's chief engineer Anders Hejlsberg, who designed Turbo Pascal and Delphi at Borland, and C# and Typescript at Microsoft.
  - eschaton 2y ago

mannyv 2y ago

I used all the major mac tools: think c, codewarrior, and mpw. I think the money just wasn't there. The PC market was the corporate market, and they were the ones who had lots of developers.

acdha 2y ago
Both lots of developers and willingness to provide regular revenue. The indie developers would hang onto an expensive purchase as long as they could between upgrades since it was often their second greatest business expense behind the comparatively much more expensive hardware.

pjmlp 2y ago

Mostly because outside US it was nonexistent. In Portugal we only had a single distributor in Lisbon, Interlog, that we would need to visit in person, or call in via ads in computer magazines, only to buy super expensive computers, versus the PC market alternative. For us, Apple only became relevant after NeXT's acquision gave it a 2nd life.

deleted 2y ago
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thaumasiotes 2y ago
> Mostly because outside US it was nonexistent. It was also nonexistent within the US.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  … limited and crazy overpriced. The first Mac was an awesome demo but not able to do much because it only had 128k; within a few years people had shoehorned that demo into much cheaper machines (even had something like Plan 9's UI for Os-9 on the TRS-80 Color Computer) Meanwhile you had the Atari ST, Amiga, Sinclair QL on the low end with color graphics 68k machines against the still monochrome Mac. These were affordable, good for games and other media, and in principle more scalable than the PC and AT architectures of the time. A little later you got very powerful 68k machines running Unix from vendors like Sun Microsystems. I first saw a Mac 2 in college after I had used a Sun cluster with huge, mostly monochrome, monitors and was blown away by the refinement of the desktop (small monitor had something to do with it) but the price tag was insane. Some people swore by mac for desktop publishing, but the Suns had great software for that too.
  - chuckadams 2y ago
    That awesome demo was on a 512K Mac at that. Jobs had insisted on a stock 128K model but the engineers expanded it without telling him.
    - 2y ago

everfrustrated 2y ago

Borlands tools were mostly used by business professionals. Sure they sold at discount to students/ hobbyists etc but professionals were the core of their market. It wasn't cheap software. The Mac market (until very recently) was predominantly for home not business use.

actionfromafar 2y ago
On the other hand, Mac hardware was super expensive. Today Mac hardware commands a little premium but pre OS 9 the difference in price was huge. So Mac owners could not have been very price sensitive in general.
- eschaton 2y ago
  A baseline Mac wasn’t any more expensive than the competition (IBM), it just wasn’t inexpensive like Commodore, Atari, and PC clones. Apple also had essentially the same price structure for decades, while PC clones raced to the bottom on both price and quality. And the Mac II was actually priced better than most competitive systems—because those competitive systems were 16MHz 68020/68881-based workstations from Apollo, HP, Tektronix, Sun, et al. In early 1987, a name-brand 16MHz 80386 system with 80387 was comparably priced, which is why most people buying PC clones didn’t get a 386 until 1990-91 or so, around when the 80486 (and 68040) came out.
  - usrusr 2y ago
    "wasn’t any more expensive than the competition (IBM)" In other words: no more expensive than the other thing nobody ever bought? The success of the PC did not lie in IBM selling large numbers.
- cmrdporcupine 2y ago
  It fluctuated. During the first few years of the Mac era they were stupid expensive. In the later Scully & Amelio years they dropped in price a lot as the component prices in the 68k Macs became way cheaper, and they became fairly affordable esp if you could get an education (teacher or student) discount, which they were aggressive about. Still was not at all a common machine in people's homes.

black_13 2y ago

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seanhunter 2y ago

For one, you could use ucsd pascal for free on mac so turbo pascal would have struggled to get traction among learners and hobbyists. Source: used turbo pascal on pc at home and ucsd pascal on apple IIcs at school.

eschaton 2y ago
You used Apple Pascal on the Apple II, not the Mac, and it wasn’t actually free but a couple hundred dollars a seat. It was based on UCSD Pascal, as were many implementations at the time, but it was a commercial product and one used by many Apple II developers. Your school either licensed or pirated it for you to use. Apple didn’t even ship self-hosted assembly tools for the Mac until the Macintosh Development System later in 1984, and when Apple did ship Macintosh Pascal it was a learning environment with a (non-UCSD) bytecode interpreter rather than a native compiler with Toolbox access. That was still something most people used a Lisa for until after both the Mac 512 and the HD20 came out.
- seanhunter 2y ago
  I definitely used ucsd pascal version II (not apple pascal, which came a bit later) on Apple II. Looking at this source[1], it looks like it both existed for Apple II and wasn't free so I must have assumed that incorrectly. I also realise I was talking about Apple II not mac. My assumption/point was that the market for apple pascal devs had been captured previously by the "power" of the UCSD p-system before the mac came along so borland figured they didn't have a chance. Personally I wasn't that much of a fan of ucsd pascal vs turbo pascal for reasons I can't remotely remember. I think ucsd pascal you could only do things in the "p-system" bytecode thing which meant it had a slightly more restrictive/pure pascal variant vs turbo pascal had some language extensions like being able to do dynamic memory allocation so you could make trees and linked lists and stuff that iirc you could'nt do very easily in vanilla/ucsd pascal. It's been a while so I may be misremembering. [1] https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1982-08/page/n193/mode/2up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1982-08/page/n193/... 15yo me didn't realise that using UCSD pascal made me one of the elite. My whole life may have gone differently had I known that.

drooopy 2y ago

In the 90s it would have been newsworthy if someone remembered the Macintosh market, not the other way around.

acdha 2y ago
They weren’t dominant but it wasn’t even remotely newsworthy to remember that entire industries like publishing, education, audio/video, science & medicine, etc. existed. Since PCs were starting from so far behind the industry had something of a chip on its shoulder and it was common to see print ad comparisons where they were showing how a PC was just as good for less money, where they’d list the optional components like a sound card and mouse not adding as much as the base difference.
bongodongobob 2y ago
Were you there? From the late 80s to mid-late 90s all my classrooms had Apple computers and Macs. Late 90s seemed to be the transition to "IBM compatible" PCs.
- drooopy 2y ago
  I was there (and then) living across different European countries in the 90s and IBM compatibles were the de facto computing standard followed by niche products like the Amiga which had a dedicated following, mostly hobbyists. But for all intents and purposes the mac was just a zombie platform over here. The first Mac that I had ever seen was the original blue iMac.
- kbolino 2y ago
  I was. There were lots of Apple computers, yes. There were not very many Macs, though. The labs full of IIe and IIgs gave way to PCs, with no era for Macs in between. There were never more than a handful of Macs around at all, and they were the cheaper ones (LC and low-end Performa). There was a small resurgence in schools with the first iMacs, but by then PC was solidly dominant. The iMacs weren't that popular with students, though, because they lacked floppy drives. Flash drives were still small and expensive, the cloud didn't exist yet, and CD-Rs weren't a good fit for small, short-lived, often-changed files.

bachmeier 2y ago

Back when I was taking programming classes in the early 90s, everything was done on "IBM compatible" PCs because of the job market. I remember one professor talking about how everyone that learned to program in high school did it on Apple computers, but said they had to switch because there were no professional programming jobs for Apple. The school had Macs, but those were for graphics-oriented classes, and they had Apples, but those were for word processing.

kopirgan 2y ago

Great company. Long long back bought their C++ compiler which came in those thick binders with a very well written guidebook on the language, OOP concept etc. Fun to read their " no nonsense licensing" legalese

pjmlp 2y ago
Most of their great stuff has been archived in bitsavers, if you want to review those manuals.
- kopirgan 2y ago
  Thanks!

bsenftner 2y ago

Speaking as a person that worked on the original Mac OS, the "story" that the OS was originally based on Pascal is not really correct. It was written in Assembly, with the belief that later developers would be using Pascal, and so Apple wrote the developer facing Inside Macintosh with Pascal as the language used for the examples. However, as far as I know no major software houses seriously worked in Pascal on the Mac; C and Assembly were the kings during the 80's and continued with C/C++ during the 90's.

nobleach 2y ago
Adobe Photoshop? That was written in Pascal.
_mlbt 2y ago
Adobe Photoshop was originally written in Pascal. MacPaint was as well.
- bsenftner 2y ago
  With a good amount of Assembly. Look at the source files: https://github.com/amix/photoshop https://github.com/amix/photoshop Even the Pascal files have assembly in them.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    It goes both ways, it cannot be a feature in C, and something bad to point out in Pascal.
    - foobarian 2y ago
      The point is, back then you didn't end up writing nice software because your language was awesomer than other languages. You wrote nice software by escaping to assembly, so support for that was important for state of the art tools.
      - 2y ago

jmclnx 2y ago

AFAIK, the MACs at the time was all point and click. Building GUI applications is not easy. Borland's IDE was text base, making that a GUI may have been to expensive based upon the amount of $ that could be made. Also, most MAC people considered themselves Artists, not developers. Most individual developers (all) were hacking on DOS at the time. So that may have played into it too. To me, it is all about potential revenue vs expense.

foobarian 2y ago
I wonder how much games played a part. In my case, deep down all I wanted to do is just play games. Ataris and Amigas had nice games but at one point the PC just blew their doors off. The Mac was a sad non-contender you used in your print shop to design calendars.
bluedino 2y ago
I often wonder where the all-caps 'MAC' originated.
- tjakab 2y ago
  My suspicion from early in my career is it was people that came from IT who just assumed that 'MAC' was an acronym for something, like pretty much everything else they dealt with, as opposed to the shortening of the proper noun 'Macintosh.'
- p1mrx 2y ago
  Confusion with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_access_control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_access_control ?

JKCalhoun 2y ago

In fact the first programming I did on the Macintosh was using Borland's Turbo Pascal for the Mac. I took an introductory programming class at the University of Kansas. it taught us Pascal and it was a new language for me (having really only known BASIC, noodled with assembly). It was a bit surprising that the class used Macintosh's — these running a kind of "project-less" version of Turbo Pascal as I recall where you simply fed in your source file with ReadLn() and WriteLn() functions sprinkled throughout and observed the result in some kind of console window. I'm not sure if I was aware of THINK Pascal (or THINK C) at that time but when I soon after bought my first Macintosh (a Mac Plus) I went looking for software to program it and it happens that a professor was selling his copy of Turbo Pascal for the Macintosh. So perhaps it was serendipitous, but Turbo Pascal became my introduction to Mac programming. I stuck with it for perhaps a year or two before moving over to the richer THINK Pascal. (And later I migrated to THINK C to run with the big dogs — having to learn about pointers and C parameter passing was a right pain in the ass for this naive young coder). (By chance, I happened to be on a mini-quest recently to try to recover these old programs that I started and abandoned back in the 1980's. And I have come across my original Turbo Pascal floppies as well as some of the crude apps I tried creating with the tool.) As others have said, I suspect Borland jumped into the game early gambling that the Mac might be the Next Big Thing, bailed early too when it turned out that it was not (that of course would quickly be the IBM PC clone market).

kristianp 2y ago
Was it hard to create windowed Mac programs in Turbo Pascal? I imagine there were headers (in C parlance) you could import for that?
- OnlyMortal 2y ago
  Pascal was a first class citizen. Indeed, quite alot of the original Mac was Pascal and 68k assembler. For example, strings were prefixed with a length byte as is popular in the Pascal world. Apple even shipped a Pascal compiler with their MPW Shell - a development environment. Personally, I used MPW C and 68k.

ubermonkey 2y ago

I had the vague sense at the time -- and, to be clear, I wasn't a Mac person until the late 1990s so it's before I knew anything about the platform -- that for reasons I never understood it was more difficult to write code for the pre-MacOS Macs actually ON those Macs. The other thing that may escape a modern reader is that the Mac timeline is really two eras: The original classic Mac era, with its Chicago-and-sepia look, and then a huge and stark transition to what was initially called OS X and is now called MacOS. They are entirely different systems, but people outside the Mac world often mistake the transition to something more like Win95 -> NT/XP. It's not that. It's way more. OS X is when the Mac got shiny to technical people, because it was (and is) based on FreeBSD, and even shipped (and ships) with a host of the sorts of tools you'd expect from a Linux distro. And it was introduced in a time when LAMP development was huge, so if you were in that world writing an interpreted language targeting MySQL and Apache it was EASIER to work on a Mac than it would've been to stay on Windows. So, sure, today we see lots of devs and even whole software companies standardizing on the Mac, but in 1995 this would have been unthinkable.

Joel_Mckay 2y ago

If I recall, it was mainly due to the market size, and to a lesser extent Apples xenophobic posturing toward 3rd party developer control. Information appliances like Mac are a streamlined workflow for Desktop Publishing, but are not intended to be repurposed in an arbitrary manner. For example, you would see a dozen choices for CAD or IDE solutions on PC, but there would only be 1 option that cost 1200% more on Mac (OS 7.5.3). Eventually the MacOS application/compiler options users had would slowly diversify under OSX/intel-cpu, but the M1/M2 architecture shift would drop again to burn down any progress people made opening the platform. The easy to cross-port GNU applications still cling to the underbelly of modern posix based MacOS, but you can guarantee it is an uphill battle to get anything deployed outside the Apple App store ecosystem build tree. Apples irrational need to monopolize their own ecosystem meant they always locked down their platform though obscurity and or DRM security. It is unfortunate Microsoft Windows 11 and Google Android still copied Apples worst design choices, as users had their control slowly stripped off hardware they purchased. Thus, most modern computer user interface design is just a sales funnel for App stores, and gentle racketeering. =3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFTyJDjfjG0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFTyJDjfjG0

jen20 2y ago
> to a lesser extent Apples xenophobic posturing toward 3rd party developer control. Classic MacOS didn't even have a first-party IDE. Everything was third-party. > but you can guarantee it is an uphill battle to get anything deployed outside the Apple App store ecosystem build tree. It's hard to even parse this sentence, to be frank, but any possible reading of it is nuts. It's trivial to install Nix on macOS and have basically every package available to you. Same with Brew, though it's less nice that way.
- Joel_Mckay 2y ago
  It is OK, people wouldn't know what is missing if they never saw the alternative. "It's hard to even parse this sentence" Try to cross-compile something on modern MacOS, and handle the DRM signing on another platform. For example, you are still going to need an active Apple Developer account to run https://quasar.dev https://quasar.dev for MacOS/iOS targets, or users are going to incur a bit of hassle running your code. It is ok, most people have trouble understanding each other at first. =3

layer8 2y ago

Imagine if we had a Turbo Swift now.

pjmlp 2y ago
Delphi, and Rem Objects has a Swift compiler. https://www.remobjects.com/elements/ https://www.remobjects.com/elements/

analog31 2y ago

I think the hurdle from a programming language to actually creating mac-like software was too great for Borland and for casual programmers. MS-DOS became where you could write and share ugly but useful programs. Hypercard changed that but it was too little too late and Apple didn't have its heart in supporting casual programming. Professional devs don't realize what a big deal Visual Basic was.

bunderbunder 2y ago
Professional devs at the time certainly did. Some thoroughly eye-watering percentage of business applications were written in VB. I'm still not sure that any modern tech has replaced the sheer "it doesn't need to be beautiful it just needs to be functional and inexpensive to build and maintain" power that we had with tools like Visual Basic. Nowadays I'm accustomed to multi-person teams needing months to build what a single skilled VB6 developer could bodge together in a couple weeks, but I still sometimes marvel at how we got from there to here without enterprise and B2B development shops calling foul along the way. Perhaps it's because they know they can cover any increase in development cost with the larger amount of money they can squeeze out of customers using modern SaaS subscription pricing schemes.

anticorporate 2y ago

As many people have said, it's only an interesting question if you don't have the context of Apple market share in the PC market, which spent over two decades between 1980 and the early 2000s in a state of almost constant decline. To me, that's the more interesting part here. Yes, everyone knows Apple is huge today, but many people apparently don't know how far from inevitable that was. If you had asked me in 2000 who would be the bigger company in 2024: Apple, Blockbuster, Toys "R" Us, or Enron, I'm not sure how I would have answered except that I'm positive I wouldn't have said Apple.

burningChrome 2y ago
>> Apple, Blockbuster, Toys "R" Us, or Enron This is such a great point. Blockbuster stores were so ubiquitous, and I never thought streaming would be a thing considering the state of the internet back in the late 90's, early aughts. Toys? Who thought a toy store would ever go bankrupt? And Enron were heralded as pioneers in the idea of buying commodities on demand and how this was going to change all kinds of different industries with their business model of how they sold their wares. Enron was considered light years ahead of companies in the energy sector. At the same point, Apple seemed to be, like you said, constantly failing, moving backwards, and essentially looked like it already had one foot in the grave when every other company was seemingly destined for a lifetime of success. Having experienced the rise and fall of all the companies you listed; I think a lot of people are unaware of how destabilizing the internet has been for companies who were unable to grasp how seismic the changes that were coming and didn't move fast enough to adapt. I think the real question is if someone other than Steve Jobs was running Apple, would they have gone the same way the companies you listed go as well?
- zaidf 2y ago
  >I think the real question is if someone other than Steve Jobs was running Apple, would they have gone the same way the companies you listed go as well? John Sculley already answered this, no?
  - philistine 2y ago

nyrikki 2y ago

People forgot the Ashton-Tate merger, which destroyed Borland's internal culture and saddled it with products that were almost impossible to move to a WYSIWYG model. They were targeting both Windows and OS/2 for the GUI implementations they did deliver with much reduced budgets. Microsoft buying FoxPro and introducing preditory pricing also didn't help. Neither did MS sniping the Quattero team. Add in Philippe Kahn and the Borland board fighting on direction didn't help. The company simply was troubled and didn't have the resources to port anything besides Pascal, which as one of the teaching languages of the day, was easier to justify.

rbanffy 2y ago

I like to imagine they couldn't make a dent in the Mac market because their products were too ugly to appeal to Mac users. Sometimes I think I'm only half joking on that. Back then, making software run on more than one platform was much more painful than it is now. Not only were the range of features provided by the OS vastly different, it was common to write performance critical parts in assembly - which made them need to be almost completely rewritten (there were macro assemblers that made that slightly easier). Unix was heralded as "open" (not to be confused with open source) because it was less painful to port stuff and make it interoperate with other Unixes.

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isodev 2y ago

Maybe they could see the future and didn’t want to pay 30% of their revenue for nothing /s.