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back to article Mystery rival forces Borland bidding war

A bidding war over tools pioneer Borland Software has broken out between MicroFocus and a mystery rival. MicroFocus has been forced to bump up its proposed purchase price for Borland for the second time, going 50 per cent over its initial offer of $1.00 per share, or $75m. MicroFocus will now offer $1.50 a share, or $113m. …

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  1. Andrew Denton 1
    WTF?

    RAD in the 80's?

    Although Turbo Pascal was highly productive in the 80's and early 90's, it could never be described as RAD. You'd have to wait for Delphi in 1995 for that.

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  2. Glen Turner 666

    Yes, RAD

    Sure. Turbo Pascal had some mean third-party libraries and you could use them to bring the user-facing part of an application to life in very short order. The tools of the time used that GUI-looking but really text mode fakery that was fashionable for a few years while we waited for GEM or Windows to run with reasonable resources.

    Compared to programs we were writing at the same time on VMS and MVS/XA the PC software development environment was leaving those heavier platforms for dead. That was the true importance of Turbo Pascal -- it didn't just say that you could develop for the PC, it said that development on the PC could be massively easier than for the bigger platforms, despite all of years of effort that had gone into developing programming tools for the bigger platforms.

    The RAD tool of choice of the time was the Clipper dBase clone, which had some marvellous libraries.

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