The Forgotten King of Databases
Borland Paradox 5 for Windows is a very special application to me, because this is where my IT career really began.
In 1996, I was a telemarketer who didn’t like making phone calls. Then the IT Manager left, and I somehow ended up working with the company’s Paradox database system. It was the first proper business IT product I ever supported, modified, fixed, and learned from.
But Paradox wasn’t just important to me. In the 1990s, it was one of the most powerful and respected database products around. Long before businesses subscribed to cloud tools like Salesforce or HubSpot, many companies built their own systems for customers, prospects, reporting, stock, orders, and day-to-day operations and Paradox was one of the tools they used to do it.
In this video, I go back to Paradox 5 under Windows 3.1, rebuild some of those memories, and look at how a once-dominant database product rose, thrived… and then almost completely disappeared.
This is the story of Borland Paradox: the forgotten king of databases.
TimeStamps
00:41 My First IT Job
01:02 Paradox Demo
07:03 Beginnings
13:00 Windows Arrives
15:00 Decline
21:18 Legacy