Borland

Borland's 1985 Reflex was a flat-file database management system for DOS. It was the first commercial PC database to use the mouse, drag-and-drop, and graphics mode.

Reflex for DOS opened multiple windows in the era before Microsoft Windows was available. For example, Reflex allowed data to be displayed in five different views: (1) form view, (2) list view (a spreadsheet format), (3) graph view, (4) report view, and (5) crosstab view. The crosstab and graph views displayed data and data relationships in new patterns that revealed more in the data than could be seen in typical database management or spreadsheet packages for DOS. Incidentally, Reflex worked well with Lotus 1-2-3 as a report generator.

As a testament to properly written software, its use continues to this day because Reflex runs on all versions of Windows through the XP Media Edition. Alas, it will not run on Vista.

The Reflex system was shipped on three 5.25", 360K floppy disks (System, Help, Report & Utilities). The diskettes were not copy-protected. The program would install and run on IBM PC-compatible floppy disk systems with as little as 384K of memory.… (meer)

This is the user's manual for Sidekick Version 1, a Personal Information Manager (PIM) launched in 1983 by Borland.

Sidekick was a Terminate and Stay Resident (TSR) program, which enabled it to load into memory, then return the computer to the DOS command prompt, allowing the user to load another application program, but still activate SideKick using a hot-key combination. This allowed instantaneous task switching in single-tasking MS-DOS. Sidekick's multi-tasking capability predated and anticipated the potentiality of Microsoft Windows.

Sidekick featured an appointment calendar, a notepad text editor (with a WordStar-like command interface), a calculator, an ASCII chart, and an address book/phone dialer.

SideKick sold more than one million copies in its first three years.

Sidekick faded away with the decline of DOS because the Windows operating system provides most of the original features of Sidekick.… (meer)

Millions of programmers and developers worldwide have come to rely on Borland language products to develop programs ranging from simple utilities to large commercial and real-time applications. In 1989, Borland released its first object-oriented programming (OOP) language, Turbo Pascal 5.5. The release of this product stimulated much interest in the object-oriented paradigm among Pascal programmers. In May of 1990, Turbo C++ helped to bring object-oriented technology to C programmers by introducing a complete implementation of AT&T's C++ for the MS-DOS platform. In February of 1991, Borland C++ brought the power of C++ to Windows programming. And in March of 1991, Turbo Pascal for Windows gave Pascal programmers access to object-oriented programming with the new Object Windows class library. This white paper discusses what makes OOP so powerful and presents Borland's philosophy for the future growth of OOP.… (meer)