Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 15th Oct 2009 14:47 UTC
Let's do a little trip down memory lane. We're talking the '80s, early '90s, and we're looking at a company called Borland, which produced several well-known and popular products related to software development. Back in those days, Borland had an end user license agreement. However, contrary to the EULAs we know and despise today, Borland's 'No-Nonsense License Statement' was a whole lot simpler, and in fact, is a perfect example of how software should be treated.
Permalink for comment 389672
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:
2005-07-12
The licensing was only part of the 'magic' that was Borland - in many ways they brought programming to the masses and were the first high-level compiled language many people got access to.
When Turbo Pascal came out, I had been writing assembler (often hand assembling machine language as bytecode) and BASIC for about six years - the reason I used those two languages is they were the only ones that were either built in or reasonably priced to work with. (TRS-80 EDTASM FTW). Even on the Z80 your average C compiler was several hundred dollars, and you wanted to work with in a 16 bit environment you were looking at a grand or more.... money most hobbyists were better off spending on hardware when 32k of RAM was an 'ungodly amount' and 4k was 'standard'.
There were no 'free compilers' - GCC wasn't even a twinkle in a backroom server geek's eye - Literally, Cobol, Pascal, even a compiled basic were all $200-$300 a pop - I remember drooling over them in the TRS-80 catalogs and realizing I had pretty much shot my load financially just on a 16k expansion interface and a single sided 32 track floppy drive.
Which is where the biggest change Borland brought to the table came into play - price. At under $60 a copy Turbo Pascal was the cheapest high speed compiler of it's day readily available through retail channels. It and the later Borland C became the weapon of choice for hobbyists who couldn't afford to shell out $300 for a copy of Microsoft C, much less a grand or so for DiBol. (I still remember my first copy of Turbo Pascal was actually for my DEC Rainbow at work)