DOS Days - Borland International

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2024-11-18 19:00:05

Headquartered in Scotts Valley, CA, Borland Ltd was started in August 1981 by three Danes - Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, and Mogens Glad. Having developed a few tools for the CP/M operating system, they recognised the need to have a presence in the US after starting out in Denmark. They contacted Philippe Kahn, and a new US company, Borland Software Inc. was formed in 1983 with Kahn as President, CEO and chairman of the new company.

Speaking in 1985, Kahn recalled, "We saw that the only uncluttered market that was available at that time was in languages. Everybody was trying to do spreadsheets and word processors and databases. But nobody was paying attention to languages, so the quality of available languages was very low.". So they decided to produce a Pascal environment for the IBM PC. "We wanted the product to run in less than 64K RAM. That was extremely important. It's easy to run compilers in 256K, but we wanted a low-memory interactive system with a powerful editor that people could use on machines with a single floppy disk and save the rest of their memory for other things. It also had to be fast in compilation and execution." He smiles. "Nobody believed it."

In fact, venture capitalists were so skeptical that Kahn and his colleagues decided to do it totally on their own. In November 1983, they released Turbo Pascal into the marketplace. It was developed by Anders Hejlsberg, who later went on to develop C# and .NET for Microsoft.

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