How I became a Delphi Centurion

During the fall of 1994 whispers and rumors of a new RAD development tool code named Delphi aka "VB Killer" was swirling around a project I was working on for the US Dept of State and USAID. One of the developers on our project was a beta/field tester for Delphi. He gave me and several others a quick demo of the new development tool.

The Idea that I could create a full featued application and distribute a single exe with no dependencies and essentially zero configuration issues was unbelievable, extremely appealing and absolutely liberating. We were retooling an entire federal government agency using VB 3 and Oracle 7.x. Now try that on for size - talk about fits and starts, cold sweats, and nightmares and that was just the first day.

I was hooked from that moment on. I never looked back and I've never had any regrets about becomming a Delphi Centurion. I pre-ordered my copy of Delphi in Februrary of 1995 and it arrive with all its glory in March of the same year. Little did I know nor did I imagine 12 years later I would be sitting here anxiously awaiting the release of Delphi 2007 for Win 32.

And in March 1995 so began The Delphi Wars...