Borland

(Borland Software Corporation, Austin, TX, www.borland.com) A software company founded as Borland International in 1983 by Philippe Kahn. The company is noted for its language and development products. It also popularized the desktop accessory for DOS PCs with its Sidekick program. With its Turbo Pascal, Borland moved Pascal out of the academic halls into a commercial product, and its Turbo C became an industry standard for DOS. Borland C++ and Delphi have been widely used for developing Windows applications, and its JBuilder environment for Java is very popular.

The company acquired the Paradox database in 1987 and dBASE in 1991, making it the leader in PC database software in the early 1990s. It later sold Paradox to Corel. In 1995, Kahn resigned as president, but remained as chairman. In 1998, Borland changed its name to Inprise Corporation in recognition of its focus on "integrating the enterprise." In 2001, it changed it back to Borland.

Philippe Kahn

Borland's founder was a notable personality in the early days of personal computing and led the company into some very successful ventures. (Image courtesy of Borland Software Corporation.)