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Zack Interview

This is a very small excerpt of an interview I did with Zack Urlocker, Delphi's first product manager and one of the desinger of the product. The interview appeared in the February 97 issues of the UK magazine Developers Review and (translated in Italian) in the Italian magazine Computer Programming.

Asked about the development of Delphi, Zack told me that:

"Delphi is really the product I'm most proud of in my career. It was a tremendous amount of fun to create Delphi. We had a small group of 4 people, most of whom are still at Borland, who were at the core of version 1.0. We developed a prototype in the first 3 or more months, and sometimes, for a laugh we bring that out to see how it compares to Delphi today..."

"In fact, the Delphi's VCL component model is really the basis of Java's JavaBean component model. Sun came to us early on in the history of Java and said they wanted to have the same RAD development of Delphi available for Java. Borland helped Sun develop the JavaBeans component model and rather than keep it as a proprietary standard, we made it open to the entire industry. So I think Delphi has earned its place as a good footnote in the history of programming."

The entire interview covers the status (and the future) of Borland, the history of Windows programmin tools (including the excerpt above), but also Java and Internet programming...