21–30 of 30 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
+1 for OWL. It was my first "real" C++ framework, and it was a great way to start. Borland had a nice tool suite but somehow just couldn't hang on to market share.
"Somehow?" Microsoft did its best, including hiring away Anders Hejlsberg.
"How did you debug applications on it? " With this bad boy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftICE
We used SoftICE extensively for driver debugging. I seem to remember a pushbutton that slid into the ISA slot to trigger a NMI but now I'm not quite sure anymore if it was SoftICE or Periscope that had that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Somehow?" Microsoft did its best, including hiring away Anders Hejlsberg.
Borland got rid of Anders, he was constantly criticizing the move away from dev tools to enterprise platforms.
"Borland Charges Microsoft Stole Away Its Employees" (1997)
http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB863034062733665000
"According to the suit, Microsoft also offered Mr. Hejlsberg a $1.5 million signing bonus, a base salary of $150,000 to $200,000 and options for 75,000 shares of Microsoft stock. After Borland's counteroffer last October, Microsoft offered another $1.5 million bonus, the complaint says."
I believed MSFT offered a lot, Hejlsberg told that to Borland, Borland offered him to stay and MSFT then offered 1.5 mil more, which Borland passed.
By the way, I didn't like much OWL. The transition between OWL 1 and OWL 2 was a mess, if I remember they were practically incompatible (and also if I remember correctly, only the name was the same, I believe different companies made 1 and 2 (!) independently) whereas it was easier to upgrade the code that depended on one MFC version to the next. I liked VCL from Delphi, then also accessible from C++ Builder, but VCL lacked Unicode for too long.
At the time of Delphi 2, VCL was very nice. Delphi 2 was really, really nice way to make native Windows applications rapidly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I loved Borland's tools. But they got Microsofted just like dozens of other apps, one by one over the years (word proc, spreadsheet, browser, etc.)
At the time, the battle over products like Quattro were with competitors like Lotus, and not MS. And Borland sure did their part. There were a number of great products they acquired and then destroyed. The Brief editor is a near and dear example for us developers, but they also went out of their way, it seems, to destroy dBase and the whole Ashton Tate thing. And Sidekick was a really cool app that they managed not t…
Sounds much more complicated than I remember it. I wrote a game called MVP Backgammon in 1991 using Borland C++ (5.x) and their integrated debugger, and do not recall any specific issues related to input queue deadlocks. You set up your PeekMessage loop or whatever and hung a breakpoint on the switch statement for the message type you needed to debug, and followed it down from there. I assume the debugger was smart e…
Did you use OWL with BC++? That was so much better than MFC although the non-standard C++ extension was a little unsavory. I also remember the BC++ debugger being pretty nice although I preferred CodeView.
Sounds much more complicated than I remember it. I wrote a game called MVP Backgammon in 1991 using Borland C++ (5.x) and their integrated debugger, and do not recall any specific issues related to input queue deadlocks. You set up your PeekMessage loop or whatever and hung a breakpoint on the switch statement for the message type you needed to debug, and followed it down from there. I assume the debugger was smart e…
Were you also responsible for MVP Paint?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Borland got rid of Anders, he was constantly criticizing the move away from dev tools to enterprise platforms.
I followed only from afar, I don't have any inside info. If you know more details than this, please tell: "Borland Charges Microsoft Stole Away Its Employees" (1997) http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB863034062733665000 "According to the suit, Microsoft also offered Mr. Hejlsberg a $1.5 million signing bonus, a base salary of $150,000 to $200,000 and options for 75,000 shares of Microsoft stock. After Borland's counter…
"How did you debug applications on it? " With this bad boy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftICE
We used SoftICE extensively for driver debugging. I seem to remember a pushbutton that slid into the ISA slot to trigger a NMI but now I'm not quite sure anymore if it was SoftICE or Periscope that had that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was it the old VGA/Hercules combination? That was so badass It was also the only way to run dual-screen for a while, since it used a different memory region than colour displays. There was literally no way to run multiple colour adapters on the same computer at one point
Man I am just not sure. I had a Hercules green screen / more shades than CGA setup myself, but if it helps I do think both of their screens were color. I know Hercules probably did other stuff, but I guess I think monochrome whenever I think about it, heh. I do believe this was the old DOS version, not the Windows version of SoftICE, although when I was over there seemed was just before the time of Windows 95 possibl…