I started my career using Delphi and was part of the local community. Two of us worked on support for Borland products at the local distributor - I went to do more development and he joined the local Borland sales team. I was often attending product launches, and presented a few times myself. I recall presenting creating ActiveX controls in Deplhi, using a plugin, in front of an applauding crowd, probably about 2 years before VB could do the same.
Data binding to client-server databases was a big deal at the time, and data-bound controls such as grids and TreeViews (which we all thought were the future) were pretty cool. It was an exciting and productive time to build data-based (enterprisey) apps that customers and users loved.
I remember when Borland launched C++ Builder, which was C++ using the Delphi component library (VCL) and IDE. Everyone was very excited during the demo until build and run (F9?) when compiling started and in the demo, in front of a couple of hundred people, my friend had to talk for a couple of minutes until the app ran - something that would have taken seconds in Delphi.
Data binding to client-server databases was a big deal at the time, and data-bound controls such as grids and TreeViews (which we all thought were the future) were pretty cool. It was an exciting and productive time to build data-based (enterprisey) apps that customers and users loved.
I remember when Borland launched C++ Builder, which was C++ using the Delphi component library (VCL) and IDE. Everyone was very excited during the demo until build and run (F9?) when compiling started and in the demo, in front of a couple of hundred people, my friend had to talk for a couple of minutes until the app ran - something that would have taken seconds in Delphi.
In it's day, Delphi was pretty cool.