I was suggested this video by YT yesterday.
It is interesting to watch and it brings may nostalgic memories.
2 Likes
The last line of that video fits with Xojo perfectly
3 Likes
I watched this because I’m a fan of history. I thought this could fill in a few holes of my knowledge about software history.
To date, I think that is the longest AI generated video I’ve ever watched. It made me feel quite… nauseous(?), dirty(?)… to think this is the future of anything video.
Granted, most of the direct screenshots looked legitimate, but any scene with a person in it was… disturbing(?). Can’t find the right word.
Which makes we wonder at the accuracy of the story.
It was AI narrated, obviously, so what about the script? Was it also AI generated? If so, we are definitely entering an era of laziness, indifference and a distorted reality that I decline to trust.
Well I lived through that period of history, and owned many of those products (TurboVision etc) and from my recollection that history portrayed was 100% accurate.
2 Likes
Delphi 7 is still my favorite development tool of all time. Wouldn’t touch it today with a 10 foot pole. Way too expensive and does not run on Macs.
But I agree, that last line iwas so prophetic…
3 Likes
For me the lines at about 20:12 - 20:33 are spot on
horrible video full of AI slop content…
1 Like
The oracle of Delphi is greek mythology. Old Story. The TurboPascal Story was reminding me to the Software I wrote for personal computers in the dos universe. I thought always that it is sad that there was nothing similar in the unix world. The most stuffs I had to write was for Unix with - in that times - ASCII Terminals. Lng time ago. I think we still have a few of them in storage from DEC… 
But that time has ended. In the Unix World with the X-Server which was showing up a desktop likle wo know it today, with Windows also on PC. Starting with Windows 3.0 it was really a windowing system which worked similar to Desktops today.
Since then Software beame more and more visual. And also the Development. Today people without any Idea of coding can write an Application with for example XoJo. Not comparable with the needs of the old platforms- UI became simple to build.
I am not wining about the times while it makes today much more fun to write while the capabilities are so good. And in old times everything was soo odd. So: we can feel good about the technology Development and remember when we see the history of a product like delphi how everything begun.
1 Like
It might be AI generated but the story is pretty accurate
3 Likes
It is really. And some moments are looking like my own history in computer science
2 Likes
Yeah I had started working for a new company around this time & they used VB
Seeing Delphi was like an “OMG !” moment
Being able to make new controls in Delphi was great & it had many things VB just kind of waved hands at
But, history is what it is and Delphi has, under both Borland and Embarcadero really languished
Heck they dont/wont even port it to use their own x-platform toolkit to make Delphi x-platform (it’d be nice if they did)
Not sure it would even matter now
They had the chance to go also on mac and Windows as Cross Platfform toolkit. Windows was not in common then and Unix…most people had no contact to. From my point of view it was different. I was more or less starting with CP/M while it was needed in really young age. When I was 17 I had the first Contact to Andy Tanenbaum and his Minix which was really much cheaper than AT&T System V. But most Software I wrote for System V and not for Minix. In 1992 I had the first contacts to a weird Guy from Norway with a new OS, Version 0.0.2 Linux, 93 started RedHat and I believe 97 SuseLinux. Really switching from Unix to Linux was starting actually in the early 2000. Many customers used for their proprietary apps still Unix V. When Santa>CruzOperation started with SCO Unix on base of AT&T System 5 in the early 90th it was first on 386 machines available but with small memory cause of the computers which where available. How ever, a few of my applications I even scaled down for the use with 8 or 10 terminals with a 386 and later 486. Man, old times.
When I looked and informed me about the DOS people I was happy not to be inside this cycle. There was no real product which made me - coming from Unix - in any direction happy. Development with Unix was and still is definitely more interesting. And yes, that is one part of the macOS changes to Unix. Made me really happy.
The ASCII Terminals are gone since the beginning of the new millenium while it could be simply based on a Windows PC and so it could be emulated which was in the most cases cheaper and with Novell Netware atsrting in the 90th PC could do one thing Unix could long time before.
If I could start again: I would. It was until now a great adventure and made me a better programmer on all platforms. I have learned a lot. And I still will.
BTW: Happy 2026!
2 Likes
I had a short chat with one of the employee called David-I. He said that there are a few windows based features that are being used by the Delphi IDE and these are not available in other OSs. Like for example its heavy dependency on native Windows APIs and low level objects.
This I think does matter as Delphi is still alive and kicking asses of old timers who still swear by Delphi. I still use it for building heavy processing windows applications like image editors. And the community edition is just superb and truly usable.
Lots to chew over there.
Offtopic, I found the videos of people tapping CRT monitors hilarious.
And given what they displayed, I’m not surprised so many of them look perplexed.
1 Like
Back in the day for some software i was creating for use in our department on a VAX, I wrote it with a sort of GUI for VT100 terminals using the drawing characters and arrow keys… While a pain to code, that was strangely satisfying back then!
- Karen
1 Like
remember there was a similar library for Terminal UI for Unic and C. It was not the best way to build a text based UI but the only one. I am so happy that this will not come back