Borland Software Corporation

Borland was founded in Scotts Valley, California in August 1981 to develop products like Word Index for the CP/M operating system using an off-the-shelf company. The founders were three Danish citizens, Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, and Mogens Glad. The most famous founder Phillipe Kahn, joined forces with Borland later.

The response to the company's products at the CP/M-82 show in San Francisco showed that a U.S. company would be needed to reach the American market.

Philippe Kahn taught mathematics at the University of Nice and Grenoble left France for the United States in 1982 with $2,000 in savings and settled in Silicon Valley in California.

Philippe Kahn together with Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, and Mogens Glad founded Borland Software Corporation in 1983. Borland Software Corporation became a leading supplier of requirement, testing and change management solutions.

Kahn contributed the remnants of his own savings to the new enterprise and rounded up $18,000 from other sources. The company rented a two-room office over a Jaguar garage for $600 a month.

Philippe Kahn was the Chairman, President and CEO until 1985. Kahn built a powerful software company from the ground up with a series of brilliant business moves, including the 1991 acquisition of Ashton-Tate, one of the software industry’s biggest companies, for $440 million.

The first product launches was Turbo Pascal, initially developed by Anders Hejlsberg. In 1984, saw the launch of SideKick, a time organization, notebook and calculator utility.

The company acquired the Paradox database from Ansa Software in 1987 in addition to dBASE and Interbase from Ashton-Tate in 1991. It made Borland the leader in PC databases in the early 1990s.

In 1998, Borland announced it had become Inprise Corporation. The move was intended to build out the company's product line in the face of competition from Microsoft Corp. and Lotus Development Corp. For a number of years (both before and during the Inprise name) Borland suffered from serious financial losses and very poor public image. In fact when the name was changed to Inprise many thought Borland went out of business. The name was changed back to Borland on January 2, 2001,.

Borland was acquired by Micro Focus International for $75 million in 2009. Micro Focus continues to support the needs of software teams who must rapidly adapt to the increasing volume and velocity of evolving business requirements. The company is noted for its language and development products.
Borland Software Corporation

Adobe System Inc

Adobe Systems Inc was established in February 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke, the inventors of the Postscript document format.

They named the company Adobe after a creek that ran behind Warnock’s house in California.

Dr Warnock was president of Adobe for his first two years and chairman and CEO for his remaining 16 years at Adobe.

Warnock has pioneered the development of world-renowned graphics, publishing, web and electronic document technologies that have revolutionized the field of publishing and visual communication.

In 1983 Adobe Systems Inc, gave a first glimpse of Postscript, its revolutionary page description language and also the PageMaker, Apple were positioned to be central to the development of desktop publishing.

Stockholders approved the merger of Aldus Corp and Adobe Systems Inc on August 31, 1994. It united the two driving forces behind desktop publishing software.

In 2005, Adobe Systems acquired it competitor Macromedia Inc, originator of Flash technology. With this technology, Adobe pursued a pricing technology strategy similar to the one employed for its Acrobat product line.

The company first offered an online version of its Acrobat software in 2008, which allows adding animation and video to documents.
Adobe System Inc

History of Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems was founded in early 1982. It was founded by Vinod Khosla and Scott McNealy, continued the long tradition of effecting a transfer of technology from a pubic funded university research project to a profit-making company by moving key people.

Two key people researchers who joined the firm later were Andy Bechtolsheim on the hardware side and Bill Joy on the software side.

The name Sun comes from initials of the Stanford University Network.

In their first year they released their first workstation based on hardware developed at Stanford University and on the BSD operating system. Ever since its inception, Sun Microsystem has maintained a singular vision of ‘The Network is the Computer.’

This vision has helped Sun Microsystems remain as one of the leading providers of industrial-strength hardware, software, and services to aid companies across the world.

In 1987 Sun and AT&T joined forces to develop UNIX System V Release 4, which combined the best of SunOS and System V Release 3.2.

By the end of it fiscal year 1992 it had surpassed over $3.5 billion dollars in sales and firmly held the market share lead in the fast growing workstation industry segment.

In 1995, Sun Microsystems unleashed Java technology, which was the first universal software platform designed for the internet and corporate intranets.

In April 2009, Oracle, another software giant, acquired Sun at a transaction value of $7.4 billion. This acquisition made both Oracle and Sun leading software-developing companies.
History of Sun Microsystems