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Mailing lists / fpc-other / 2010-02

Borland /was/ planning a 32 bit TP for Dos

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Jonas Maebe

Hello,

See http://blogs.embarcadero.com/chrishesik/2010/02/05/35169 (excerpts from an old internal Borland market/roadmap document).

TP32 for Dos was mainly for "harvesting" purposes though: "This 32-bit compiler code base will enable us to continue to harvest upgrade revenues with new versions."

At the end, it reads: "But this revenue stream will decline over time if there is no clear commitment to Pascal on 32 bit DOS and Windows."

Apparently they didn't see "and some people might simply start writing their own compiler" coming :)

Jonas

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Henry Vermaak
to Jonas Maebe
Jonas Maebe wrote 9 lines
Hello, See http://blogs.embarcadero.com/chrishesik/2010/02/05/35169 (excerpts from an old internal Borland market/roadmap document). TP32 for Dos was mainly for "harvesting" purposes though: "This 32-bit compiler code base will enable us to continue to harvest upgrade revenues with new versions." At the end, it reads: "But this revenue stream will decline over time if there is no clear commitment to Pascal on 32 bit DOS and Windows." Apparently they didn't see "and some people might simply start writing their own compiler" coming :)

:) And they didn't think that all those other platforms will become important, either.

Henry

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Graeme Geldenhuys
to Henry Vermaak
Henry Vermaak wrote 5 lines
> > Apparently they didn't see "and some people might simply start writing their own compiler" coming :) :)  And they didn't think that all those other platforms will become important, either.

+1
A very narrow vision. :)

Regards, - Graeme - _______________________________________________ fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/

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Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho
to Graeme Geldenhuys

Well, from the perspective of that time and reading the document it really seams they had a good vision of the future, and they got it right by investing heavily in Delphi as something easy as VB but much more powerful.

If anything, any potential loss of 32-bits DOS sales was more then offset by having FPC add a huge amount of value to the Pascal language.

What impresses is that the same company with so much vision in 1993 managed to have not such a great vision (or implementation) at 2001 with Kylix and then having a totally wrong vision in 2003 with Delphi .NET and basically managing in the end in the 6 years between 2003 and 2009 to implement only 1 big feature: unicode support ...

I wouldn't care much, but their lack of vision severely harmed the Pascal job market.

Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho

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Graeme Geldenhuys
to Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho
Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho wrote 6 lines
What impresses is that the same company with so much vision in 1993 managed to have not such a great vision (or implementation) at 2001 with Kylix and then having a totally wrong vision in 2003 with Delphi .NET and basically managing in the end in the 6 years between 2003 and 2009 to implement only 1 big feature: unicode support ...

That amazes me too. They were pretty unbeatable in the 80's and early 90's, then it was downhill from there. Borland even built a huge office (the Borland Campus) which was home for over 1200 developers at the time. I believe Borland relocated but left some developers behind. Which became CodeGear, with a hand-full of employees. I read the other day that they are now also leaving the Borland Campus offices. One minute you're right up there and the next minute you are down in the dirt. :-(

Lets hope it does take 6 years for FPC to get Unicode support - that means we will only see Unicode by 2016!! :-/
I better schedule some time at the office so I can work on the 'cpstrnew' branch.

I wouldn't care much, but their lack of vision severely harmed the Pascal job market.

Very true, but I think it's busy picking up again. Every little bit helps.

Regards, - Graeme - _______________________________________________ fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/

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