History
Delphi was originally one of many codenames of a pre-release development tool project at Borland. Borland developer Danny Thorpe suggested the Delphi codename in reference to the Oracle at Delphi. One of the design goals of the product was to provide database connectivity to programmers as a key feature and a popular database package at the time was Oracle database; hence, "If you want to talk to Oracle, go to Delphi".
As development continued towards the first release, the Delphi codename gained popularity among the development team and beta testing group. However, the Borland marketing leadership preferred a functional product name over an iconic name and made preparations to release the product under the name "Borland AppBuilder".
Shortly before the release of the Borland product, Novell AppBuilder was released, leaving Borland in need of a new product name. After much debate and many market research surveys, the Delphi codename became the Delphi product name.
The chief architect behind Delphi was Anders Hejlsberg, who had developed Turbo Pascal. He was persuaded to move to Microsoft in 1996.
- Delphi offered for sale
On February 8, 2006 Borland announced that it was looking for a buyer for its IDE and database line of products, including Delphi, to concentrate on its ALM line.
- Delphi transferred to Codegear
On November 14, 2006 Borland transferred the development tools group to an independent subsidiary company named CodeGear, instead of selling it.
- Sale to Embarcadero
Borland sold CodeGear to Embarcadero Technologies in 2008. Embarcadero retained the CodeGear division created by Borland to identify its tool and database offerings, but identified its own database tools under the DatabaseGear name.
Read more about this topic: Embarcadero Delphi
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