February 14, 2025 – David I's Everything About Software Development (including the kitchen sink)

By David Intersimone “David I” – Friday, February 14, 2025

Today we celebrate the 30^th anniversary of the launch of Delphi version 1.0 on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 1995, at the Software Development West Conference in San Francisco California. More that 12 years of continuous IDE, language, tools and library development led up to the launch of Delphi version 1.0.

The development of Delphi can trace some of its roots and technologies across Borland product releases including Turbo Pascal 1 (DOS and CP/M), Turbo Pascal 3 (overlays), Turbo Pascal 4 (units), Turbo Pascal 5 (integrated and standalone debugger), Turbo Pascal 5.5 (objects), Turbo Pascal for the Mac, Turbo Pascal for Windows, Borland Pascal 7 for DOS and Windows, Paradox, dBase and InterBase. While Borland Pascal 7 was available, the development team had been working for about 2 years to complete the first Delphi release (see links at the end of this article for a few of the important historical documents).

The Delphi “Sneak Peak” at the Borland Conference 1994

The first public showing of Delphi took place at the Borland International Conference (BIC) 1994 Walt Disney World Dolphin and Swan Hotels, Orlando Florida. The original language track was focused on Borland C++ 4 and also Borland Pascal. Paul Gross gave the “Product Address: Languages” in the Swan Ballroom on Monday morning from 8-9:15am. Prior to the conference a last minute decision was made to add two Delphi sessions: “Sneak Peak: Rapid Application Development in Pascal” session given by Zack Urlocker (Delphi95) and Bill Dunlap’s sneak session, “Sneak Peak: Exception Handling in Pascal”. “Even Spencer the Cat hasn’t seen this,” said senior product manager Zack Urlocker. Delphi95 will “compete with Visual Basic on the low end and PowerBuilder on the high end.”

It’s funny to look back and remember that the title of the Zack and Bill sessions were titled “Sneak Peak” – instead of “Sneak Peek” – a purposeful choice of the word “Peak” to denote the state-of-the-art technologies in Rapid Application Development (Visual Basic and PowerBuilder still did not integrate native code compilers).

There was also an NDA session for leading Paradox developer partners where Delphi95 was presented. One of the questions during the session was “is this the Paradox compiler that was rumored to be in development?” The answer was no, unless you wanted to use Delphi and the BDE to access your Paradox files.

The Delphi v1 Launch – Valentine’s Day, February 14, 1995

The Delphi launch took place at the Miller Freeman Software Development Conference West in San Francisco California, on Valentine’s Day, February 14^th 1995 at 7PM just after Philippe Kahn’s keynote “The Importance of Object Computing – The Algorithmic Link”. Two editions of Delphi were announced: Delphi and Delphi Client/Server. Before the launch, we were demonstrating existing Borland language products in the Borland booth. The day after the launch we demoed Delphi to overflowing crowds of enthusiastic developers.

While we annually celebrate the launch of Delphi version 1.0 on February 14, the actual RTM (release to manufacturing) date, and the date that all of the Delphi v1 files are date stamped, was February 15, 1995. Gary Whizin, R&D manager for Delphi tells the story about the RTM date in a 10 year remembrance audio interview. Gary said that the team did sign off the Delphi 1 master on February 14, 1995 before driving to the conference for the product launch. A stop ship bug was found and the product was re-mastered and the team signed off the first version again on February 15, 1995 (the date stamp on the files).

What Made Delphi version 1 So Special

While Microsoft had Visual Basic and PowerSoft had PowerBuilder, what differentiated Delphi was the combination of the power of the Object Pascal language, a visual component-based development environment and desktop and SQL database access:

High speed, native code compiler
IDE providing visual two-way tools – form designer and source code editor
TObject, records, component, and owner memory management
Property Method Event (PME)
Visual Component Library (VCL)
Runtime Library (RTL)
Structured exception handling
Data-aware components live at design time
Database support via BDE and SQL Links

Running Delphi v1 on Windows 3.1 in a DOSBox on a Win10 (or 11) PC

To Get Started

If you’re unfamiliar with how to install and run Delphi v1 on Windows 3.1, watch the YouTube video, “Stu’s Game Reviews – How to Play Windows 3.1 Games in Windows 11!!! New for 2024!!!”. Sure, it’s about installing Windows 3.1 and running games, but the information and steps work for any Windows 3.1 software including Delphi v1. Hint: you don’t need to install the drivers mentioned in the video unless you also want to play games. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4vtHkan5xw

The Software You Need to Run Delphi v1 on Windows 3.1

The following is a list of the required software to get Windows 3.1 and Delphi running on your Windows 10 (or 11) PC.

DOSBox-X: https://dosbox-x.com/ or DosBox v7.4.2 https://www.dosbox.com/download.php?main=1

Windows 3.1 (Retail) (3.5-1.44mb) Contains 1.44mb 3.5″ retail disk images https://winworldpc.com/download/41574932-18c3-9a11-c3a4-e284a2c3a570

Borland Delphi 1.00 (2-15-1995)(CD) ISO https://winworldpc.com/download/c2b3c3be-c38a-e280-b00b-c38711c3a5ef

Borland Delphi 1.00 (2-15-1995)(CD).7z contains the following folders:

Installing Windows 3.1 and Delphi v1

To install Windows 3.1 and Delphi v1 I used DOSBox-X because it has a feature to easily handle swapping the Windows 3.1 six floppy disk image files and because “Stu” told me to use it 🙂

Install DOSBox-X and choose a folder on your Windows 10 (or 11) PC hard drive. Select all of the default settings during the install.

To install Windows 3.1, start DOSBox-X and mount the floppy disk image files for Windows 3.1. (note: I put the Win31 floppy disk images on my hard disk in a folder named “c:\w31”. I installed Windows 3.1 in my c:\DOSBox folder). The commands I typed were:

mount c: c:\DOSBox
imgmount a: c:\w31\disk01.img c:\w31\disk02.img c:\w31\disk03.img c:\w31\disk04.img c:\w31\disk05.img c:\w31\disk06.img -t floppy
a:
setup

When Windows setup asks you to put disk 2 in drive A:, use the DOSBox-X menu “Drive” menu item, select drive A and in the popup menu select “Swap disk” (note: Guy said you might be able to use CTRL-F4). This will “put floppy disk 2 into drive A”. To complete the Windows 3.1 install, repeat this procedure for each of the remaining floppy disks. Note that DOSBox-X is in control of your mouse. When the Windows install asks for input (for example when it asks you to type in your name and company), hit CTRL-F10 to switch mouse control to the program your installing and then to get mouse control back to DOSBox-X hit CTRL-F10 again (you will hear an audible beep each time you hit CTRL-F10 if your PC’s sound is turned on).

When you choose to exit the Windows 3.1 setup program click the “Reboot” button to restart the DOS virtual machine to take you back to DOSBox-X.

To install Delphi v1 I put the CDROM install image, Delphi.iso, in my c:\installs folder. Using DOSBox-X, I typed the following commands:

imgmount d: C:\Installs\Delphi.iso -t cdrom
c:
cd windows
win

After Windows 3.1 starts, use the “File Manager” app to install Delphi.

and click on the “d” drive that contains the Delphi 1 CDROM.

Open the “INSTALL” folder and you’ll see folders containing the contents for each of the 15 floppy disk images (DISK1-DISK15) and the SETUP.EXE program.

Click on the SETUP.EXE program to install Delphi 1. Note: if you have the separate floppy disk image files (not recommended), follow the Windows 3.1 DOSBox-X “imgmount” command and floppy swap disk steps above for selecting and using all 15 of the floppy disk image files.

After Windows 3.1 and Delphi v1 were installed, the following is the c:\DOSBox folder contents:

With Windows 3.1 and Delphi v1 installed you’re now ready to experience the intoxication of using Delphi version 1.0 on your Windows PC 🙂

Running Delphi version 1.0

To run the Windows and Delphi you just installed, you can use either DOSBox-X or DOSBox.

Type the following commands:

mount c: c:\DOSBox
cd windows
win

Then from within Windows open the Delphi folder and click on the Delphi icon. Note: use Ctrl-F10 to capture and release the mouse for use on your PC desktop and in the DOSBox running Windows.

Check Out the Delphi version 1.0 Easter Eggs

In the Delphi v1 IDE select the Help | About menu item.

Hold down the Alt-key and type (all caps) DEVELOPERS

Hold down the Alt-key and type (all caps) AND

You’ll see a picture of Anders Hejlsberg floating in one of the lakes on the Borland campus in Scotts Valley, California. I shot a video of Anders (in Denmark Donald Duck is called “ANDERS AND”), during an all day party to celebrate his engagement, and grabbed a video frame to put in the About Box for Delphi.

Hold down the Alt-key and type (all caps) TEAM

You’ll see multiple pages of the names of the extended Delphi team that were a part of the development, launch and support of Delphi 1.0 (in alphabetical order by first name).

Here is a group photo of the extended Delphi team taken in the outdoor amphitheater on the campus.

Three Delphi adds that appeared in developer magazines during the launch year

Happy 30^th Anniversary Delphi Launch Day!!!

I send big hugs and love to all of the employees who ever worked on Delphi. I send my thanks to all of the technology partners and MVPs who support Delphi. And, I send my deepest thanks to all of the customers who have ever used Delphi (many still do), attend Delphi conferences and seminars, participate in Delphi user groups, participate in online webinars, and share knowledge, source code and suggestions to help everyone (including me) become better Delphi software engineers.

Check out my YouTube video: Windows 3.1 and Delphi version 1.0 running on my Windows 10 PC

I can’t finish this Delphi anniversary story without including a special developer, author and educator in my life, my brother separated at birth, and my technology travelling companion. That very special someone is Charlie Calvert. Charlie started at Borland working in technical support. Charlie is the author of “Turbo Pascal Programming 101”. After getting to know Charlie, I knew he was a one-of-a-kind developer, author and human being. I asked Charlie to join me in Borland Developer Relations. During the development of Delphi we knew that we would need great documentation, example programs, and to rev up our global Turbo Pascal community to be ready for the launch of Delphi. Charlie used his unique talents as a developer and an author to create his “Delphi Unleashed” book and also helped the team with the documentation. Charlie and I traveled the world together to present Delphi to customers, at conferences and meet with partners. While we were both children of the 60’s wearing comfy clothes (I wear Tie-dye t-shirts almost every day), on a trip to Madrid Spain we met with the government technology team working to create Spain’s early eBanking infrastructure. Nestor Miranda, head of the Borland office in Madrid, asked us to wear suits for the meeting because we were going to meet the head of the Bank of Spain. Along with two of Charlie’s programming books here is, probably the only time, a picture of Charlie and me at our hotel before we left for the meeting.

While I don’t travel, write, present and program nearly as much as I did during my 30+ years at Borland International, Inprise, Borland Software, CodeGear and Embarcadero, I have the code, pictures, videos and great memories that keep me smiling. I still program using Delphi as a semi-retired software engineer. Programming keeps me young, happy and alive!