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Frank Borland

Frank Borland is a fictitious software developer, invented by Philippe Kahn as a Marketing Vehicle for the Borland Software company in 1984.

The name and image of Frank Borland first appeared in Frank appeared in the first version of the Turbo Tutor manual. Turbo Tutor was a book and disk combination that taught Pascal programming to those new to the language and Turbo Pascal. The pictures, drawn by local artists, were used throughout the manual as visual representations for key programming concepts that were being introduced.

The story that was perpetrated at the time was that nobody knew who wrote the Turbo Pascal compiler; but the myth says that it was written by Frank Borland a guy who works alone and lives in a cabin high up the rocky mountains and only goes back to civilisation when he creates a new version.

He also appeared in advertisements, and on the cover of the SideKick version 1.0 manual.

Publicity material at the time described him as: "Frank Borland is more mystique than mystic, as elusive as the Trinity Alps big foot, as shy as the famous Loch Ness monster. Even at Borland International, his namesake, few people have ever seen him. The old-timers recognize him for his remarkable algorithms, still the fastest in the west. Borland lives deep in the Santa Cruz mountains with his transportable computer, his burro, and his dogs. In the early days, he didn't have a permanent homestead, but lived in a couple of camps deep in the redwood groves. Now, Frank has settled down a little, bought a cabin, and is raising a family, thanks to the success of his programming. These days he is seen even less around town, but still can occasionally be reached by modem."

In 2012 Micro Focus, who bought Borland Software, re-introduced the Frank Borland character across a number of social media platforms to re-engage with the established developer community.