Today is Delphi’s 23rd birthday. The product was launched on Valentine day in 1995 in San Francisco (and I had the luck to be there, as I covered in the past). 23 years is a lot of time for people. It is a incredibly long time for technologies. It is hard to find a language, framework and IDE from 23 years ago you can use to build todays’s and tomorrow’s software. Of course, the IDE, language and frameworks have evolved and keep evolving — developers using them can modernize their apps without a full rewrite.
In this 23 years, millions of developers and have used Delphi to build millions of applications, and applications used by millions of users. The most used Delphi application ever build is probably Skype for Windows. But it has been used to build applications worth millions in sales and moving millions in financial markets. And Delphi is still used to day to maintain those applications and create new ones in industrial, financial, health, travel, and sport fields (among others)… including mobile apps for its birthday. Or to run a miniature airport.
In these 23 years the product has changed a lot (Hey, I’ve changed a lot from the picture in the link above!), Below you can find a comparison of Delphi 1 running on a VM and Delphi 10.2.2 (with dark theme) running on the same machine. It is not a Photoshop, it is an actual screenshot!
Both versions of the IDE have a VCL application with a Button and the Caption property highlighted in the Object Inspector. I didnt’ include the about bos of 10.2.2 (as I was trying to do) because it is a little too big. One of these days I’ll make a parallel video of working on both. But you know what? Most applications you build in Delphi 1 can be recompiled with few changes in the 23 year later version. Well, as long as you don’t use pointers, as Delphi 1 had 16 bit pointers (ugh!). Of course, most applications you write in todays product don’t have a chance to run in the older sibling.
Speaking of today, Embarcadero (and the PM team I’m part of) just announced some more plans for this year, and the plan does include the coming release of an additional quality focused update for 10.2 Tokyo, 10.2.3. Now 10 x 2 + 3 is in fact 23. Or Delphi 10 version 2.3. We have a lot in the works for the next mayor release, but also want to keep improving on the quality of Tokyo and release it as soon as possible.
What else can I say? Just invite to you watch Jim Mckeeth great “23 years” Why I Love Delphi video.
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