Borland

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Borland

(Borland Software Corporation, Austin, TX, www.borland.com) A software company founded as Borland International in 1983 by Philippe Kahn, who resigned as president in 1995 but remained as chairman. Borland was acquired by Micro Focus International in 2009. The company is noted for its language and development products. It also popularized the DOS desktop accessory with its Sidekick program. Borland's Turbo Pascal moved Pascal out of the academic halls into a commercial product, and its Turbo C became an industry standard. Borland C++ and Delphi were widely used for developing Windows applications, and its JBuilder Java environment was very popular.

The company acquired the Paradox database from Ansa Software in 1987 in addition to dBASE and Interbase from Ashton-Tate in 1991. It made Borland the leader in PC databases in the early 1990s. It later sold Paradox to Corel and spun off Delphi, JBuilder and Interbase into the CodeGear division.

In 1998, Borland changed its name to Inprise Corporation in recognition of its focus on "integrating the enterprise" but changed it back to Borland three years later. See Turbo C, Borland C++, dBASE Plus, Interbase, JBuilder, Paradox and Delphi.


Philippe Kahn
Borland's founder was a notable personality in the early days of personal computing and led the company into some very successful ventures. (Image courtesy of Borland Software Corporation.)
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References in periodicals archive ?
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And the independent software vendors which have traditionally supplied the volume software development tools market, such as Symantec and Inprise Corp (formerly Borland), are under pressure in the market from its biggest enemy, Microsoft Corp, and seeking more support from the major systems vendors.
Inprise showcased several educational enterprise software solutions at CAUSE98, a tradeshow for information technology in education, held recently at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center.
Inprise Corp says that its JBuilder family of Java development tools and its new Application Server product will support the next release of Sun Microsystems Inc's Java 2 platform.
UUNET, a UK provider of Internet services for business, has selected Inprise/Borland's Inprise application server for its new global engineering database.
"JDataStore, which operates seamlessly with JBuilder, is a natural progression for our commitment to Java," says Dale Fuller, interim CEO of Inprise. "JDataStore's Pure Java implementation allows users to access data over multiple platforms, thus allowing companies to succeed in a Web driven economy."
First, the very future of ISVs which have traditionally supplied the volume developer market such as Inprise (Borland) and Symantec are hanging in the balance with the possibility the market could be handed to Sun's arch enemy Microsoft Corp.
INPRISE interim chief executive Dale Fuller on his company's decision to back out of a merger with Corel, whose stock lost 70% of its value after the merger was announced: "This is not what we signed up for." (Quoted in Information Week, 5/22/00)
For example, one-time market leader Inprise, formerly known as Borland, has seen revenues shrivel in the last five years and has had only one profitable quarter in the last five.