Everybody seems to be blogging about Delphi having been around for 25 years, so I won’t stay back and tell some of my story.
When I finished university and started a job, Delphi was just about being “born” and I was working with Turbo Pascal and later Visual Basic. VB was great in some aspects because it allowed to easily design user interfaces and write code only where you needed it. It wasn’t after several years later that I was introduced to Delphi when I took a job at fPrint UK Ltd. (Yes, that’s what web pages looked in 1997) and moved from Germany to the UK. The time I worked there was among the best of my life. I had some great coworkers there who were expert software developers (Hello Mamta, Allan, Vitaly and Linden, if you read this. And RIP to you, Andrew). We were already using Delphi 3 by that time and it delivered everything that Visual Basic had only been promising. I was hooked for life. We also worked on Virtual Pascal, a Pascal compiler compatible to Borland Pascal and partly Delphi which had originally been Vitaly’s project. Working for fPrint later made me move to Paris (France) for a while. Back then I also made first contact with GExperts.
Fast forward to 2020. I had changed jobs frequently until 2007 due to companies I worked for being bought by others and working conditions deteriorating afterwards. I made my fist million D-Mark (and lost most of it shortly afterwards, never gaining it back). I even had to go back to programming in Visual Basic 6 for a while (and I hated it).
Today I work at TÜV Rheinland Schniering GmbH (formerly Schniering Ingenieurgesellschaft) and develop Software in Delphi for road condition surveys. It is running on our measurement vehicles and also used in the office and at customer’s sites. As software development jobs go this is way cool, and again I have some great coworkers, this time not only in software development, because we also build our own measurement hardware and even developed the elevator examination system Liftis© (software by me, hardware by my coworkers) for our parent company TÜV Rheinland.
I really wonder how my career and my life would have turned out if Delphi hadn’t been around at the time I started out. Maybe I would have ended up as a COBOL programmer for life at Debeka (which was my first employer). Or I would have written embedded software in C for some company I didn’t even get to know. At some time I even interviewed for a job at a company (I forgot the name, but it was located in Dreieich near Frankfurt, Germany) that was developing a search engine written in Delphi (Edit: I remembered: They called themselves “Twirlix” and apparently folded in 2001, shortly after my interview)
Thinking back, this has been some exciting time to be alive and for me Delphi played a significant part of it.