Borland International

Software company originally founded in Denmark in 1979 by Niels Jensen as Midas ApS and initially specialised in creating add-on products for the WordStar word processor, later branching into the making of sundry microcomputer software products. A shell company was incorporated in the UK in 1981 as Borland Ltd. taking advantage of the exceptionally relaxed tax laws the country has when it comes to taxing foreigners and foreign entities. Even though Borland is a family name with origins in central Europe it has no relation to any of the founders of the company, it simply came as the name of a so-called "off the shelf company" that had already been registered with the name and as no one had registered it as a trademark, the Danish owners decided they liked it, and kept it as a brand name for their products.

The company became well known in 1983 when it started marketing PolyPascal that they licensed from the PolyData company in Denmark, alongside an in-house developed editor and rudimentary IDE under the name Turbo Pascal. It was at the time considered revolutionary as a Pascal compiler for CP/M and later DOS due to speed (it was a single pass compiler) and price that was only US$ 49 at a time when most of their competitors in the Pascal marketplace were 300 to 1000 US$. A year later Phillippe Kahn is hired to lead the marketing of the product in the USA. Later in 1984 the company shipped what became the companies best selling and most profitable product in the form of Borland Sidekick, one of the few of their early products that was actually developed in-house.

In 1985 the headquarters of the company are moved to London, although for tax purposes a shell company is based in Ireland that is known as "Borland International", a development team based in the London HQ takes over the design of future development products. The same year Borland took over the USA based company Analytica in order to get their hands on the Reflex flat file database, this bought with it a development team that included Brad Silverberg who later went on to become Borland's VP of engineering and Analytica founder and main developer Adam Bosworth, this became the first USA based development team that Borland had.

While Reflex was indeed one of the best flat file databases out there, sold reasonably well and got great reviews, it was facing a much tougher competition than the rest of their product line. Sidekick and Turbo Pascal had more or less defined their own market niches and came to dominate them while Reflex became a perpetual also-ran in a market full of contenders ranging from budget options in the shape of Buttonware's PC-File to in-memory databases like Q&A that offered much greater speeds than Reflex could muster.

The company was turned into a public concern in 1986 when its stocks were listed on the London "Unlisted Securities Market" (part of LSE, similar to AIM) and were heavily oversubscribed.

Niels Jensen left Borland in 1987 to found Jensen & Partners International (JPI) after disagreements with other board members in relation to the decision to buy in the Wizard C compiler to sell as Turbo-C, but the Wizard C as a product was of a somewhat indifferent quality and Jensen objected to buying in a product from a third party at a time when an in-house compiler with multiple front ends, including C and C++ was close to being finished. And while re-branded Wizard C/Turbo C sold extremely well on the strength of the "Turbo" brand, the initial 1.x release of it did indeed prove to be an extremely troublesome beast, but it took an almost complete re-write for version 2 for it to be competitive with other budget C compilers on the market.

When Jensen left he took with him the second generation compiler and released it under the TopSpeed brand in versions for Pascal, Modula-2 C and C++. The Ada front-end developed by Borland and finished off by JPI was never released by the latter company as by the time it had been finished to a validatable standard, the USA Department of Defence had decided to sponsor a freeware versions of an Ada compiler the eventually became GNAT, and JPI decided that there was not a market for a commercial offering in competition to a free one.

After Jensen left the company its headquarters were effectively moved to the USA although technically the company was still Irish due to tax reasons. The company was by then headed by Philippe Khan who went on a spending spree buying database developer Ansa Software in September 1987.

The company held two further IPO's in the USA in 1989 and 1990.

Known products

• Borland C/C++ - C & C++ development system
• Borland Paradox - Database system
• Borland Sidekick - PIM/Utility suite
• Borland Sprint - DOS word processor
• BRIEF - Text editor
• Reflex - DOS/Mac database.
• Turbo Assembler
• Turbo Debugger
• Turbo Pascal
• Turbo Prolog