For a number of years, from the mid-1980s and through the 1990s, I made a living writing software mostly using Turbo Pascal and its descendants, Borland Pascal (with Objects) and Delphi. I was interested when I heard that Rick Ross of the Central Ohio Delphi and .NET Developers Group was going to host a presentation by David Intersimone. David “I” worked for Borland as Vice President of Developer Relations and Chief Evangelist before Borland sold their developer tools division, CodeGear, to Embarcadero in June, 2008. David now works for Embarcadero and is on the road for their Delphi 2009 Productivity Tour.

In its early years, Delphi paved the way for competing RAD tools such as Visual Studio. Unfortunately (for us lowly developers anyway) Borland fell in love with big enterprise bucks and even changed its name to Inprise for a while. Borland was known as a developer tools company and the management at the time probably thought the name change would help break them out of that box. “Look, were not a Bor-ing developer tools company, we’re meant to be in your enterprise!” They eventually changed their name back to Borland (Borland Software Corporation) but did not lose their appetite for enterprise bucks. They did not seem to invest much in their developer tools but focused instead on ALM (an acronym I assume is taught to managers – stands for Application Lifecycle Management).

Rick Ross and David I

I attended the meeting on Wednesday, February 18th, in Dublin Ohio. The first thing I noticed about David I is that his beard is much more awesome now than in the pictures I’ve seen. David presented some demos of Delphi 2009 and Delphi Prism. Some of the demos are also presented by Nick Hodges in this video which is introduced by David I (check out David’s green tie-dye against the blue background – groovy, man!). The presentation was good but I enjoyed the “war stories” from his years at Borland even more. It’s also nice to see Embarcadero spending some cash on promoting their developer products.

David I’s blog: Sip from the Firehose