Borland International was a software company that became famous in the 1980s for low-cost, high-quality programming tools. Its Turbo Pascal Reference Manual lists the company as “Borland International, 4113 Scotts Valley Drive, Scotts Valley, California,” and Borland’s first hit product, Turbo Pascal, launched in November 1983.
The company, led by Philippe Kahn, built its reputation on a simple proposition: a professional compiler that was fast, integrated, and cheap enough for individuals to buy. Niklaus Wirth, describing the rise of the microcomputer, recalls that “the Borland company” shipped its own version of a Pascal compiler at a time “when other compilers were expensive software,” and calls this “a turning-point in commercializing software” that opened up a mass market where “computing went public.”
On the strength of Turbo Pascal, Borland expanded into a line of “Turbo” development products and other tools. Its later flagship, Delphi, was a visual development environment built on Pascal and designed by the same engineer, Anders Hejlsberg, who had written the original Turbo Pascal compiler.
Borland’s lasting influence is less about any single product than about a model: bundle the editor, compiler, and run environment together, make it fast, and price it within reach of ordinary developers. That model helped define the integrated development environment as the everyday tool of professional programming.