Happy Birthday Delphi

Ten years ago today, I skipped school and went to the Software Development '95 conference with a few friends of mine. We were studying software engineering, and so going to SD'95 seemed like a good idea. Boy, was it ever.

Borland was launching Delphi 1 at the show that night. During the day, Borland had been giving demos in their booth every hour. They only had about fifteen director's chairs in the booth, and it wasn't even close to enough. Delphi was the sensation of the show and the demos were packed. People were lining up eight or ten deep around the booth. Literally hundreds of people were crowded around, watching Zack Urlocker demonstrate Borland's new development tool. Delphi promised the power of C++ with the ease of use of Visual Basic, and it delivered. Producing real, stand-alone, compiled EXE's was manna from heaven. People couldn't get enough of it. The Microsoft booth demoing the latest incarnation of VB was dead. The Borland booth was overflowing. The buzz was palpable.

Delphi was the sensation of the show and the demos were packed

It was particularly fun for me, because I was lucky enough to have been on the beta. Since I was living in Monterey, I was able to attend what was then called the Compuserve Online Picnic in Scotts Valley. I was just a hobby programmer at the time, just starting in on my software engineering studies, and I spent a lot of time on Compuserve asking questions about Borland Pascal 7.0, and trying to give a little back by answering as many questions as I could. I idolized old school TeamB'ers like Kurt Barthelmess and Pat Ritchey. I dreamed of meeting guys like Steve Teixeira and Xavier Pacheco, then Borland's entire Tech Support team for Pascal. The picnic was truly a thrill – all the more so when all those guys were glad to meet me. I met Charlie Calvert, David Intersimone, and Zack Urlocker there as well.

Delphi was still a rumor at that time – the late summer of 1994 – and so all I knew about it then was what was on the forums. (There were no web sites at the time to help spread rumors and information; the entire Pascal community consisted of people on the Compuserve forums.) Zack had been hanging around helping to fuel the hype, and so we ended up chatting. I'm sure I sounded to him like a screaming Beatles fan, but he graciously asked about what I was studying. I told him about my ideas for a development methodology, and he said that he thought Delphi would fit right in to it. He then spoke those fateful words, “Send me an email, and I'll get you on the beta”. I could hardly believe it.

He then spoke those fateful words, “Send me an email, and I'll get you on the beta”.

So, by Valentine's Day, I had already built TSmiley and was beginning to understand the power of Object Oriented Programming and Component Building. David I gave some sessions that demonstrated how easy it was to build Delphi components. He showed that you could build them directly in Delphi, using a relatively easy to understand syntax. This was a revelation. VB developers could use components, but to create components they had to write complex C/C++ code. Being able to build components in the same language as you were developing your application in was a godsend. David I was gracious enough to point me out as the author of the TSmiley component he was demoing. Again, it was thrilling for me.

By that evening, the buzz was at a fevered pitch, and the launch even was packed. The entire Microsoft team was seated in the back, and you could see they were upset not to be the center of attention. Anders Hejlsberg came out and started talking, and I guess the rest is history. The thing I remember most (besides not being able to find a seat) was Anders purposefully causing a GPF (remember those?) by calling to a nil PChar. Now, back in those days, doing something like that could crash Windows, but here's Anders doing it on purpose. Well, he ran the application, and of course Delphi gracefully caught the exception and ran on without problems. The Microsoft people in the back were hyperventilating.

At the end of the show, Borland said they were going to give away preview versions of Delphi to the first 250 people that showed up at the booth the next morning. The doors opened at 8:00am, and by seven thirty, the convention center had to call the police to control the crowd of people crushing the doors to get in and get a copy of that demo disk. It was surreal.

And so Delphi was born. Structured exception handling, properties, fully compiled, runtime free executables – Delphi had it all. Ten years ago. Long before C# programmers thought they were the ones to invent those things.

Delphi has advanced over the years, moving from 16-bit to 32-bit to Linux and to .Net. It has added cool language features like interfaces, overloading, and nested classes. It has continued to be the best tool for 99% of the programming tasks out there. I'm quite honored to have been a small part of getting it off the ground and keeping it off the ground these ten years.

So, I extend a hearty thanks to everyone who has made Delphi what it is today. It's been awfully good to me these past ten years.