Okay, I must have got that wrong. Thanks for the correction. I must have mixed up 6 and 2006, likely, since that Delphi Digital Clock v1.0 I mentioned elsewhere in this thread was written by me in 2010.

>TBH i think it made more harm than good overall since it disallowed installing custom components (which defeated a big reason for using Delphi)

Could be so. Yes, even the current Starter editions of Delphi 10.x (code named Berlin, Tokyo etc.) disallow that, IIRC. Or don't have the DB-bound controls (I forget which of the two it is, or whether both). I get your point about not being able to install custom components, which was/is one of the big plus points of Delphi, like VB before it (VBX and then OLE controls).

It hugely increases the ecosystem and potential, and was one or the main reason for the runaway success of VB (the other reason being the drag-and-drop GUI creation and ability to hook up procedures to events by clicking on an event in the event list of a control, and writing a snippet of code that reacts to the event, in the window that popped up, so I've read (I did some VB projects earlier too)).

But I do think that even the limited versions of Delphi are useful, to let beginners get entry to such a good RAD tool. Price is an issue for the full tool, I know.

Of course, I'm somewhat aware of the meanderings and corporate missteps that have troubled the product over the years, every now and then, as it transitioned from Borland to Inprise to Codegear to Embarcadero to ...

>and it was based on perhaps the buggiest and slowest versions of Delphi ever released with a convoluted setup procedure (that among others required an obsolete version of .NET).

Didn't know that stuff. (Heard about the varying bugginess of different Delphi versions over the years, though.) IIRC, I installed and used the Win32 version of Turbo Delphi Explorer, since I prefer non-managed EXEs in general, having a background in compiled languages like C and Pascal from earlier.