Заранее извиняюсь, длинно, поэтому переводить не буду.

1) Цитата из Chris Pollach
PowerBulder was developed as a protoype by Cullinet Database Systems of
Boston. Cullinet was the developer of the IDMS DBMS and ADS-Online
(Application Development System). IDMS was developed by BFGoodRich (the tire
company) in London, Ontario, Canada and sold to Cullinane (who later changed
their name to Cullinet). They had an early PC product called GoldenGate
which proved you could do Client / Server applications with mainframe
DBMS's. They also realized that PC DBMS's and development tools were on the
immediate horizon (1984). Cullinet had an enormous success with ADS-Online
(327x based RAD development tool) and wanted to see if a similar GUI based
tool could be developed. The main features of ADSO were: RAD; RealTime
design, programming, compiling & debugging; Interactive prototyping; Used a
centralized DataDictionary; Interfaced with various CASE tools; and, Could
deploy to production from deveopment; etc!
So in 1984 (when I was the Technical Manager for Cullinet Canada),
Cullinet started the PC ADSO prototype (which would later be PB). The
project leader was Dave Litwack (who was in charge of the ADSO product and
IDMS-DC [data communications - teleprocessing system - CICS equivalent
product]). Dave had a great understanding of RAD development tools and
Telecommunications experience because of his Cullinet experience. The new
product was to have the same key functionality as ADSO (ORCA was basically
working in 1985!), but also add a real key feature: "a smart data aware
object" (Cullinet was experimenting at that time with a feature called LRF -
Logical Record Facility and DB procedures). This object would encapsulate
data handling away from the Application, but would be a client piece, so
that there was NO dependency on any DBMS! For this part of the prototype,
Dave chose a real keen "C" programmer named Kim Sheffield.
A friend of mine from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada- John Griffin - was
recruited by Dave. John was an excellent assembler programmer and wanted to
cross over to "C". So Dave had him build the "Menu" painter (in later years,
John married Julie (another Cullinet developer) and later on, Julie would
help rewrite the Menu Painter and add Remote Debugging to PB for EAServer!
Dave also wanted to have the new tool fully object oriented. The C++
language was coming on strong and SmallTalk was the "talk of the town" for
serious OO programmers. Dave wanted PowerBuilder to move grow) in this OO
direction. So in 1985 a crude prototype was shown to the Cullinet inside
circle. The products potential was immediately expounded by senior
management (one of those being Bobby Orr - the hockey legend (another good
story I can tell you sometime) - who was on the board of directors of
Cullinet at that time).
Unfortunately, Cullinet had serious challenges for various take over
bids by different companies, including CA (Computer Associates). CA at that
time had already purchased DataCom and wanted Cullinet for IDMS. CA's
mentality at that time, was to buy out the competition, sell off any non-key
products and milk the maintenance contracts of key clients. With little or
no development personnel (fired), there was no overhead and all profit. In
1986, CA was successful on a hostile take over of Cullinet. The new PC
product was considered non-essential and all developers were let go (that is
why today I will never buy a CA product)!
In 1986, PowerSoft was developing business applications for the VAX
platform. PowerSoft also realized the PC development arena was about to
explode and started looking around for a leading edge GUI development tool.
They hired an independent consultant (Dave Litwack) to help advise them on
exactly what they should be looking for. At that time, Gupta's SQLWindows
was the only serious product. Other than that you had to get down and code
"C" - which was not what PowerSoft wanted business programmers to use. Dave
mentioned his involvement with Cullinet and their last prototyping effort.
PowerSoft approached CA and asked if they could acquire the prototype code
(originally done in "C"). CA said that they had looked at the prototype and
that there was NO future in it - so gives a few bucks and good luck!
So in 1988, three years after the original concept prototype, PowerSoft
had the code and Dave (now hired by PowerSoft) was able to hire the other
programmers who worked on the original prototype (what a fluke!) as they
were looking for some challenging work at that time as well. PowerSoft then
christened the new product "PowerBuilder" and began to enhance the code.
Since they were a business solutions developer, they used PowerBuilder
internally to recode and replace their VAX products. So testing was
"hands-on" and very intensive under real world developer scenarios. In order
to get funding for this intense effort, PowerSoft partnered with HP. HP gave
them a blank cheque after seeing a demonstration (they are also responsible
for the Tilde "O" format [~Onn] for "octal" as HP was an 8 bit machine in
those days). PowerBuilder became an internal standard at HP. At Microsoft's
Redmond office, the people in charge of internal systems were faced with the
same problems PowerSoft was trying to resolve, they needed a tool for
business developers. So they contacted their friends at HP and were told
that PowerBuilder was the only up-and-coming tool they should look at. So,
in early 1989, Microsoft purchased licenses for PB (2nd world wide user as
the "Royal Australian Airforce" was the first official user - makes me proud
as I am an Australian from Cooma, NSW. When I was 4 my dad took me to the
University of Sydney where he was using the ENAC I [first computer built -
IBM in the USA was NOT the first]) to do the stress and strain calculations
on the Snowy Mountains Hydro Electric power dams (largest hydro generation
in the world even today), that is where I met the 1st "debugger" in the
world [another story]). Microsoft used PowerBuilder for their Inventory
Management System, MS University Scheduling System, etc and were "blown"
away with it's data prowess - especially this new object called the
"DataWindow" (thanks Kim!).
In 1989, I was doing a project for the Canadian government on behalf of
Revenue Canada and, Treasury Board. My task was to evaluate emerging RDBMS
technology and recommend the top three that would be recommended to all
government departments. I competed that in the late summer of 1989. One of
the contenders was Microsoft's SQLServer (which was a port of the release
4.x version of Sybase's SQLServer to the OS/2 platform). In order to verify
the final benchmark results, I had a representative from each DBMS vendor
drop in and tweak their environments and concur with my approach and
results. To that end, a Microsoft engineer from New Hampshire came to
Ottawa. He was extremely helpful and asked about what I was going to do
next. I told him that the next phase was to review and recommend GUI
development tools for the three recommended RDBMS products. This is when the
guy floored me, he said that we should call this new company PowerSoft and
get PowerBuilder because all his developer buddies at Redmond were using
PowerBuilder (certainly not what the MS salesman was saying!). So I called
PS, but they said I could not get an evaluation copy, I had to buy it - but
I could return it if I did not like it (if any of you have worked for the US
are Canadian governments, you know what kind of stupid remark that would
be). But they told me the history of PB so far and about hiring an
x-development team from a DBMS company in Boston who got bought out by CA.
So I thanked the salesperson, hung-up, hit the redial button, and asked for
Dave Litwack - where I was immediately put through (to my pleasant
surprise). Dave said "How the **** are you Chris!" was the response and the
next day a copy of PB was on my desk (thanks again Dave!).
I passed the release (0.8 which came on two diskettes at the time) to
my developers and they pounded at it for 3 days and took it for a spin with
the top RDBMS's we had in place. PB's "DataWindow" was like a "breath of
fresh air" when it came to data handling and SQL generation compared to any
tool we had touched thus far. The speed was also very close to "C", and made
SQLWindows look like molasses in January. So PB became the top recommended
product of the top three development tools recommended to the Canadian
Government. Revenue Canada used the product to build the GST (Government
Sales Tax) processing system which captures and tracks all GST Tax returns
even to this day - talk about mission critical. Other departments soon dove
in, and today, most Canadian Government departments use PB for their mission
critical systems (coming into Canada - scanned your license plate [checked a
DB managed by PB], scanned your passport [all done with PB], landed on a
Canadian runway [billed by PB working in concert with the radar system -
24x7 operations], have an Old Age pension [front end all done in PB -
released January 2002], etc and many, many more!
In the early 1990's SQLWindows and then new product - Delphi - took a
run at PB from the performance side. SQLWindows added "C" generation and
Delphi came like that out of the box. This made SQLWindows as fast as PB,
but Delphi blew PB away in looping operations. The DataWindow (90% "C" and
10% assembler) still blew the other products away [I have a great story this
year on VB.net VS PB 8 at a Government department using MS-SQLServer, PB
blew VB away by 4000% better performance - but getting back to our history
lesson ...]. Dave, Bill Rabkin ("the" original PB technical Evangelist) and
I had discussions about compilers for many years, we often remarked how
efficient the Waterloo, Ontario, Canada guys were at building top-of-the
line compiler technology. At the same time Gupta (SQLWindows) started
shipping it's own RDBMS (SQLBase) with their own product. So PowerSoft
wanted to do the same to match the completion. So it came as no surprise to
me when they started shipping the WatComSQL RDBMS with PB (I think that was
release 2). Like Victor Kiam ("I liked it so much I bought the company"),
that is exactly what PowerSoft did for release 3! But, a hidden gem appeared
to PB right after that, when Dave said to the "C" compiler guys at WatCom,
could you take PB's P-Code and generate pure "C" (PB at that time had moved
from "C" to "C++"). The WatCom people said: "Sure" and had it working within
a week! This made PB even toast Delphi in performance and with the
DataWindow, leave them in the dust (and still does today). At the same time,
Bill Gates came to Ottawa to deliver a key note address to the Canadian
Government. I met Bill and he informed me of some interesting facts: MS uses
the WatCom "C" compiler for the VB JET engine, some of MS-Access and all of
FoxPro for Windows. MS could NOT convert to their own "C" compiler as it was
400x slower than WatCom's and the user community would not stand for the
performance loss. A friend of mine who was hired out of Toronto to work in
Redmond, told me that Bill wanted VB to be fully OO and he had a prototype
(1993-4), but upon demonstrating the product, key business users would not
accept the necessity to completely rewrite the code (like VB 6 to 7
programmers have now) in order to properly derive full OO benefits. They
told MS that they were better off with PowerBuilder. Recently, many VB 7
programmers here in Ottawa have told me that they are recommending that
their departments go to PowerBuilder as it is MUCH more OO friendly and the
learning curve is substantially lower (interesting comments?).
In the mid 1990's Gupta was crushed by Oracle's multiple attempts to do
a hostile take over. Oracle wanted to compete against PB, but PowerSoft was
untouchable. So they went after SQLWindows to replace their development
suite (SQLForms, etc). Even today, any student of mine that has developed in
SQL Forms and sees PB, drops it like a hot potato. A recent example I worked
on, was a new system that was developed by 2 Oracle developers on an Oracle
DB. They worked for 9 months to try and build this new system and could not
even get a prototype done. I worked on the system for 3 months with PB 7 and
had the full system working within 3 months. This blew away the Oracle
developers even on their own DBMS! The application is currently running
under PB 8.0.1. Dave Litwack and the PowerSoft executives were very nervous
about Oracle's actions (shades of CA dejavue), and wanted to band together
with a larger company to make sure another CA would not happen to them.
Sybase had helped port the SQLServer DBMS over to the MS-NT Platform and
knew of PB's prowess (even today 63% of ALL Oracle DBMS sites use PB as the
development tool), but lacked any good GUI development tool. So the two
companies merged (and brought WatCom along) to better compliment their
technologies into a one company offering.
During the merge however, the "tools innovation" direction of PowerSoft
was lost - due to Sybase's Server mentality at the senior management level.
But I believe now with the recommitment to PB 9 and 10, down turn of Java
(New statistics stated that 60% of all US companies that started a Java
project last year - canned it!), PocketBuilder direction for Windows CE
(Pocket PC), etc this might be refocusing development efforts at Sybase (but
that's another story).

2) Bob Zurek - former VP of Research and Technology and Chief Evangelist at Powersoft (was responsible for having PowerSoft develop PowerSite, which is now imbedded into PB as Web Targets).

www.apress.com/vbat10/essay.html?eID=BobZurek

Side note:
Bob Zurek was pushing PowerSoft to buy a little known product from a startup
company. PowerSoft was in negotiations with them - but decided to act slowly on
Bob's recommendation. One week before PowerSoft was to make an offer, Microsoft
bought the company and product. You all now know this product now as Microsoft-FrontPage...