From its inception, Borland International was the Animal House of high tech, a group of self-proclaimed software barbarians who broke all the rules and had all the fun. Led by its wide-girthed founder, Philippe Kahn, a Frenchman who started the company with no green card and very little cash, Borland seemed to lead a charmed life for the first few years of its existence. But the trouble with barbarians is their appetite. They tend to like to sit down at the table, rip off a big slab of meat from a half-cooked haunch, and eat rapidly without properly chewing their food. Combine this unfortunate habit with Kahn’s Gallic background and the stage was set for tragedy. Confronted with software’s biggest frog, the Frenchman’s savage nature got the best of him and he choked to death attempting to swallow what any civilized person would have realized was a very unpalatable amphibian indeed.
Borland made its debut in the industry in a big way with the release of Turbo Pascal in November 1983. Turbo Pascal was a port to DOS and CP/M of Anders Hejlsberg’s COMPAS Pascal, and it was rereleased by Borland at a price that seemed amazing at the time: $49.95, about one-tenth the price of comparable products. With a single stroke, Kahn had upset the price structure of a market category, a tactic he would employ again and again in the future. Even better for buyers was the product’s capabilities: Turbo Pascal integrated an editor, debugger, and compiler in what would later become known as an integrated development environment (IDE). The product was a runaway smash and to this day Borland dominates the market in Pascal-based development tools.
Turbo Pascal was a breakthrough in another way. It was the first product of its type to bypass the software distribution channel and be sold directly to customers. Readers of BYTE magazine who bit on Borland’s full-page ads for Turbo Pascal sent their 50 bucks straight to the company. Borland’s marketing coup heralded the beginning of a struggle that high tech wrestles with each day: the desire of companies to bypass the intermediary and sell directly to their customers versus the power of distribution systems to “break bulk” and reach a wide audience of potential buyers quickly.
As befits its Animal House antecedents, Borland pulled off a frat house–style prank to get its advertising placed that has entered the annals of industry legend. As Turbo Pascal neared completion, the company found itself long on chutzpah but short of the cash needed to place its ad in BYTE. Borland dealt with the problem by inviting a BYTE ad salesperson to visit Borland and meet Kahn to discuss ad placement. While this individual waited outside Kahn’s office, the BYTE ad salesperson managed to “overhear” a conversation between the company president and a company employee masquerading as a salesperson from a rival magazine discussing Borland’s advertising plans with that publication. Ad salespeople having the morals of, well, software barbarians, the BYTE representative agreed to cut a deal that allowed Borland to place its ad in BYTE without an upfront payment if Borland would agree to change its placement strategy and “emphasis.” Borland was glad to agree and history was made.
After Turbo Pascal’s introduction, the company continued to release a steady stream of successful utilities and programs, including a keyboard macro product, a low-end database, more languages, and most famously Sidekick, the first of a short-lived class of terminate and stay resident (TSR) products. TSRs took advantage of an oddity in DOS that allowed them to stick around in memory after they’d been shut down. A keystroke combination recalled the product, which popped up in a window over your current application. Sidekick integrated an editor, a calculator, a phone dialer, and some other goodies in a neat little package that gave buyers an early taste of the joys of a multitasking software environment.
Borland was aided in its growth by Kahn’s astute handling of the media. In addition to his ability to sweet-talk the publishing side of the PC press, Kahn was also a favorite of the editors and writers. Kahn played saxophone, was a karate black belt, gave good quote, and always seemed to be involved in some newsworthy antic, such as Borland’s wild toga party at the 1984 COMDEX trade show. He also possessed a talent for getting under Bill Gates’s skin, and the press always appreciates a good gladiatorial contest.
An example of Kahn’s persuasiveness was demonstrated when he convinced PC Magazine to give Borland’s minor-league TSR spelling and thesaurus utility, Turbo Lightning (for a while practically every product in Borland was “turboized”), front cover status. The accompanying article was a breathless piece that discussed how Turbo Lightning was going to revolutionize … uh … spelling. (The author of the article, pundit Paul Somerson, was still living that one down years later.)
Kahn was also quick to promise end users that they too would share in the booty when Borland’s conquest of the software universe was complete. He became famous in the mid-1980s for decrying the high price of software, proclaiming that it should be priced like a “book,” and pointing to the pricing of Turbo Pascal as the wave of the future. The crowds, as could be expected, roared their approval and for a while Philippe Kahn was the most popular man in software.