I first came to Delphi shortly after D1 was released. We were looking for a Windows development platform for all our old DOS-based Clipper apps. Computer Associates had just bought Clipper from Nantucket Software, and they released “Clipper for Windows”, in real life called “CA Visual Objects”, or VO.

CA’s strategy was kind of strange… Instead of using the WinAPI like Delphi did to handle things, they’d licensed some third-party windowing library. The windows and other controls looked just like the API ones, but they were in these third-party DLLs that had to be distributed.

Even remembering that at the time, my development machine was a then top-of-the-line 486SX-25 with 16MB of RAM, VO was ssllloooowwww. I could start a new project, drop a single button on the form, and hit the Compile button, and then:

- Go to the office kitchen and refill my coffee cup.
- Go outside to smoke a cigarette and drink my coffee.
- Go to the kitchen and again fill my cup.
- Drop the cup at my desk and go to the restroom.
- Come back and still wait for the compile.
- Decide I didn’t like the text on the button, change it, and hit “Compile”.
- Repeat the entire coffee/smoke/coffee/restroom trip and wait some more.

Did I mention VO was slow?

It also had a “deployment builder” tool that was supposed to create the SETUP for your application and create the diskettes for you. I tried it once, using the same test project I described above.

When I was prompted to insert disk #4, I cancelled. (At least four 1.44MB disks for a plain button on a form???)

I also discovered that, even if you didn’t do any type of database access in your app, you had to distribute all of the DB-related DLLs. All 12 of them.

Delphi is a blessing!