Borland Software Corporation was a computing technology company founded in 1983 by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad, and Philippe Kahn.

[4] Borland Ltd. was founded in August 1981 by three Danish citizens – Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, and Mogens Glad – to develop products like Word Index for the CP/M operating system using an off-the-shelf company.

The main shareholders at the incorporation of Borland were Niels Jensen (250,000 shares), Ole Henriksen (160,000), Mogens Glad (100,000), and Kahn (80,000).

In 1984, Borland launched Sidekick, a time organization, notebook, and calculator utility that was an early terminate-and-stay-resident program (TSR) for MS-DOS compatible operating systems.

[8] Bruce Webster reported that "the legend of Turbo Pascal has by now reached mythic proportions, as evidenced by the number of firms that, in marketing meetings, make plans to become 'the next Borland'".

While the Danes remained majority shareholders, board members included Kahn, Tim Berry, John Nash, and David Heller.

With the assistance of John Nash and David Heller, both British members of the Borland Board, the company was taken public on London's Unlisted Securities Market (USM) in 1986.

Brad Silverberg was VP of engineering until he left in early 1990 to head up the Personal Systems division at Microsoft.

This drove a wedge between Borland and Niels Jensen and the other members of his team who had been working on a brand-new series of compilers at their London development centre.

They reached an agreement and spun off a company named Jensen & Partners International (JPI), later TopSpeed.

Lotus Development, under the leadership of Jim Manzi, sued Borland for copyright infringement (see Look and feel).

[12] In September 1991, Borland purchased Ashton-Tate, bringing the dBASE and InterBase databases to the house, in an all-stock transaction.

[14][15] Borland had an internal project to clone dBASE which was intended to run on Windows and was part of the strategy of the acquisition, but by late 1992 this was abandoned due to technical flaws and the company had to constitute a replacement team (the ObjectVision team, redeployed) headed by Bill Turpin to redo the job.

Borland lacked the financial strength to project its marketing and move internal resources off other products to shore up the dBASE/W effort.

By the mid-1990s, however, companies were beginning to ask what the return was on the investment they had made in this loosely controlled PC software buying spree.

Company executives were starting to ask questions that were hard for technically minded staff to answer, and so corporate standards began to be created.

This required new kinds of marketing and support materials from software vendors, but Borland remained focused on the technical side of its products.

In 1993 Borland explored ties with WordPerfect as a possible way to form a suite of programs to rival Microsoft's nascent integration strategy.

The eventual joint company effort, named Borland Office for Windows (a combination of the WordPerfect word processor, Quattro Pro spreadsheet, and Paradox database) was introduced at the 1993 Comdex computer show.

In October 1994, Borland sold Quattro Pro and rights to sell up to a million copies of Paradox to Novell for $140 million in cash, repositioning the company on its core software development tools and the Interbase database engine and shifting toward client-server scenarios in corporate applications.

The Delphi 1 rapid application development (RAD) environment was launched in 1995, under the leadership of Anders Hejlsberg.

The legal name of the company would continue to be Inprise Corporation until the completion of the renaming process during the first quarter of 2001.

Nielsen remained with the company until January 2009, when he accepted the position of chief operating officer at VMware;[30] CFO Erik Prusch then took over as acting president and CEO.

[31][32] The transaction was approved by Borland shareholders on July 22, 2009, with Micro Focus acquiring the company for $1.50 per share.

[33] Following Micro Focus shareholder approval and the required corporate filings, the transaction was completed in late July 2009.

[36] On April 5, 2015, Micro Focus announced the completion of integrating the Attachmate Group of companies that was merged on November 20, 2014.

[38] Other programs are: Along with renaming from Borland International, Inc. to Inprise Corporation, the company refocused its efforts on targeting enterprise applications development.

[42] The idea was to integrate Borland's tools, Delphi, C++Builder, and JBuilder with enterprise environment software, including Visigenic's implementations of CORBA, Visibroker for C++ and Java, and the new product, Application Server.