Borland Announces Three New-User Versions of Delphi; Free 30-day Trial Version to be Available on www.borland.com; Educational and Low-Price Versions for Beginners and "Buy & Try" Developers

Business Wire, Sept 3, 1996

SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 3, 1996--Borland International Inc. today announced three new versions of its award- winning Delphi rapid application development (RAD) tool, including a 30-day trial edition that users can download free-of-charge from the company's World Wide Website at http://www.borland.com/delphi20/. The other new versions are an educational "Learn to Program with Delphi" package for students, hobbyists and other beginning programmers, and Delphi 2.0 -- an easy-to-use, low-price version designed to encourage software developers to evaluate Delphi.

"These easier and less expensive new versions make Delphi's award-winning tools more accessible to a greater number of people -- combining the ease-of-use of tools like Visual Basic with the power of C ," said Fred Felman, Borland's group marketing manager for client tools. "We also want to show existing developers how the new Delphi 2.0 can help them add productivity and performance to their current application development environments."

Delphi is Borland's family of high-performance RAD tools for Microsoft Windows 3.1, Windows 95, and Windows NT. Introduced in March 1996, the Delphi 2.0 product line is winning awards and customer praise due to its suite of powerful visual development tools that enable individuals, corporations and government organizations to build sophisticated, lightning-fast applications in less time. Delphi includes the world's fastest native code compiler, reusable components, Internet and Intranet development tools, and supports a broad range of industry computing standards, such as ActiveX controls, OLE 2.0, ISAPI, NSAPI, OLE Automation, DDE, MAPI, COM, and ODBC. The new Delphi product line -- "Learn to Program with Delphi," Delphi 2.0, Delphi Developer 2.0, and the Delphi Client/Server Suite 2.0 -- supports all levels of users, from the beginning programmer to the professional client/server developer.

Learn to Program With Delphi

The new "Learn to Program with Delphi" package is designed for anyone interested in learning Windows programming quickly and easily. Delphi's new easy-to-understand documentation and visual drag-and-drop tools make it possible for beginners to create and compile their first Windows application in a matter of minutes. No programming experience is necessary. In addition to the 16-bit Delphi 1.0 software, "Learn to Program with Delphi" includes:

"Teach Yourself Delphi 1.0 in 21 Days" -- this best-selling tutorial is written for beginners, and provides an easy-to-follow, step-by- step course so that all levels of computer users can quickly master Windows programming with Delphi.

Computer-Based Training (CBT) -- an online curriculum teaches users that visual programming can be as easy as drag-and-drop, cut-and-paste, and point-and-click.

Sample applications with source code -- shows beginning programmers the best way to organize and create applications for their everyday use.

The New Delphi 2.0

Delphi 2.0 has been enhanced with additional tools that make it more accessible for new developers, and easier than ever to create high-performance, 32-bit Windows applications. In addition, Borland has included new functionality to show how Delphi can be an excellent value-adding tool for Visual Basic and C developers:

The award-winning "Teach Yourself Delphi 2 in 21 Days" tutorial guidebook includes step-by-step courseware and CD-ROM to get developers up-and-running with Delphi immediately.

New online "Visual Basic-to-Delphi Command Reference" -- a complete listing of VB commands mapped to their Delphi equivalents. Delphi 2.0's new documentation shows Visual Basic developers how they can improve the performance of their VB programs by easily creating reusable DLLs in Delphi that run at least ten times faster than interpreted code.

"I'm a Visual Basic developer who bought Delphi for writing DLLs," said Carl Hewitt, a programmer for the Christian Broadcasting Network in Virginia Beach, Virginia. "The productivity you can achieve with just a few lines of code, the tight data integration, and the speed of the executables really sold my company on Delphi."

New online "Delphi Reference for C Developers" -- includes techniques and suggestions on how C programmers can increase their development productivity by using Delphi 2.0 for visual prototyping or by quickly building full-featured, high-performance front-ends for their C applications with Delphi.

"It takes too long to write everything in C , so we design user interfaces in Delphi," said Doug Weigel, a member of the technical staff for Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, California. "It really propels us through application development. The DLLs to actually run the instruments are written in C . This works very well for us."

Pricing and Availability

The new Delphi 30-day trial version will available free-of charge beginning next week from Borland's World Wide Website, at http://www.borland.com/delphi20/. It is also available on CD for a $10 shipping and handling charge from Borland s customer service department, at 1-800-233-2444. Additional information about the trial restrictions and requirements are included as part of the software.