Talk:Borland Sidekick

The following entry of http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Borland_Sidekick is not correct:

Origin

According to Philippe Kahn, Borland did not originally intend to sell Sidekick. It developed the utility as to assist the small company's employees. After several months of use Borland realized that it had a salable product.

I am therefore proposing to replace it with the following entry but have been advised that since I am an insider to these events, this will be seen as a conflict of interest. I can see the point, but it is difficult to see how else events can be described if not by those who were there.

The fact that Philippe's version of events differs from reality is a little complex. The situation back in the early 1980s was that we (Borland) had been trying to break into the US software market from our European base for a number of years without much success. Not until our presence at the CP/M-82 show did we realise that the problem was that Americans prefer to do business with Americans, so to sell our software we needed to create a US presence which had to come across as an all-American company.

For this reason we formed Borland Inc with Philippe as Chairman and CEO, who - with the compliance of his European co-founders - created a "smoke screen" to hide the origins of Borland's products, which all came from Denmark. This worked incredibly well, and the rest is history.

Precisely because it is now all history, the smoke screen is no longer needed and should not continue to mask real events. I am not proposing to comprehensively rewrite the Borland entries on Wikipedia, only to correct a few glaring bits of misinformation. I am not doing this to promote myself or anyone else but believe it is in the interest of those who take an interest in companies like Borland and the processes behind their products to relate the true events that led to Sidekick, instead of an old wives tale.

Kind regards, Ole Henriksen, Co-founder, Borland International Inc.

Origin

Sidekick was developed in early 1984 at a time when Borland was enjoying popularity with its Turbo Pascal compiler but was worried about being a "one product company" whose single source of revenue was of unknown potential and might run out of steam (the fear proved unfounded but was nevertheless real at the time).

At a gathering in the home of Borland President and CEO Philippe Kahn, he and Borland co-founders Niels Jensen and Ole Henriksen therefore set out to find candidates for new products. As part of this process, Henriksen tested a wide range of software popular at the time, noting their various strong or weak points and compiling lists of improvements and new ideas.

A few days of this work resulted in lengthy, handwritten notes, so Henriksen started thinking it would be easier if he could write his observations on the same computer that was running the software being tested. Essentially, he wanted a computer notepad, and if he wanted one, maybe others did too.

That could not be done with the technology of the day, which allowed only one program to run at a time, but a discussion of the concept, and a phonecall to Borland developer and fourth co-founder Mogens Glad back in Copenhagen, led to the suggestion that an undocumented API function of MS-DOS called TSR (Terminate Stay Resident) might facilitate the concept of executing multiple programs at the same time.

After testing the suitability of TSR to the task, the initial idea for a notepad rapidly expanded to include many other useful tools, and thus Sidekick was born and quickly became a second leg for the young company to stand on.

olehenriksen 16:31, 16 January 2014 (UTC)