It’s been a long time. Delphi just turned 30 and I was there at the start.

When I was made redundant from my not so budding career as an actuarial student I worked a number of short term jobs, one of which was for an international shipping company that had, for reasons better known to them, decided to automate their entire management system with a series of linked 1-2-3 spreadsheets.

At the time I was a bit of a 1-2-3 guru and had only narrowly missed out on landing a job with Lotus, due to my lack of experience with OS/2.

Anyway, languishing at the bottom of a cupboard in the offices of said shipping company was a small stack of floppies containing Borland Turbo Pascal 5.5. These got “borrowed” and somehow found their way on to my home PC.

Being mostly out of work I rapidly learned the Object Pascal language as I used it as a tool to solve the monthly Scientific American number theory puzzles they published at the time.

When Delphi was released, it was readily available as a freebie CD with some of the computer magazines, so that got installed as well, and I was hooked. I hadn’t used VB, but it was a vast improvement on the Access app designer that I had been exposed to.

Eventually the Delphi hobby became paid work, and not a day goes by without me using Delphi to perform my job.