My personal „Delphi“ story began in 1987. Entering a new school I had to learn a programming language called Pascal. That time it was Turbo Pascal 3 on MS DOS (5 or 6?) and the first 286 IBM PCs. It fascinated me from day one and so it was given to study computer science.
Unfortunately this moved me away from my beloved Pascal and I had to learn C, C++, Assembly. At February 14th 1995 Delphi 1 was released.
Pascal, now called Delphi 3, came back into my life when I joined Extended Systems at April 1st 2000. I was overwhelmed by the possibilities this IDE provided. Writing data driven Windows applications was just a matter of dropping some components onto a form and setting some properties.
Later on Delphi enabled to write Linux (Kylix) and .NET (Delphi 8) applications without the need to modify the source code.
After leaving Extended Systems (in the meantime acquired by Sybase and SAP) and founding my own company I became Delphi MVP.
Today Delphi is still one of the best IDEs I’ve ever worked with. Using FMX instead of VCL gives the opportunity to compile the same set of source code for Windows, mac OS, iOS, Android and with FMXLinux even for Linux.
Delphi turns 25 these days and is still a popular IDE. Happy Birthday, my long term companion.
For all of you haven’t worked with Delphi at all or for a long time, get your free Delphi Community Edition and experience yourself how easy you can develop your applications.
Happy Birthday, Delphi