[flaie]

I remember when I discovered Delphi, it was in circa 2001-2002.

At the time I was 16-17 and knew how to program with PHP (I was modding phpBB at the time), tried with PHP-GTK to build user interfaces, but found it not that great.

Then I discovered Delphi, already knew some parts of Pascal. But what a gem it was, in a matter of days I felt like I was totally proficient, could create windows, manage resize, add components, tweak colors, run background tasks, want a listview? just drag it. Need a HTTP call? drag the component (can't remember the name), connect onclick to it, and you're done. I recall the website torry.net with plenty of libraries to download.

I also tried Borland C++, but wasn't good enough with it, and as I remember discovering that even DevC++ was written with Delphi. Simply figuring out it was good enough for me.

I created so much things with it until like 2004-2005 I think, like a complete terminal on my Windows, re implementing standard commands all within Delphi. Wrote some games companion for Rainbow Six and RavenShield [1], fetching statistics and available servers, scanning games to find your friends, downloaded thousand times. An alt-tab which worked with Quake III that at the time was also downloaded hundreds of times, a companion to The All Seeing Eye (server browsing), a small Photoshop tool where I learnt how to create my own filters like Gaussian blurs and so on [2], key mapping profiles for plenty of games by modifying INI files [3], a code formatter inside DevC++ [4], ...

I have lost all of my source code (didn't knew how to backup things at the time), still have some binaries and screenshots for posterity

I remember this period with nostalgia and great passion.

Thank you Delphi for the good times and all the fun, this is when I really knew what I wanted to do after school.

[1] https://rehost.diberie.com/Uploads/37/20210215-160435-948cd7... [2] https://rehost.diberie.com/Uploads/37/20210215-160351-cc03e0... [3] https://rehost.diberie.com/Uploads/37/20210215-160401-712b1f... [4] https://rehost.diberie.com/Uploads/37/20210215-160338-6f856c... && https://rehost.diberie.com/Uploads/37/20210215-160330-cc512a...