: The license strictly forbade using the software to create products for sale.

With , you opened the IDE (2 seconds), dragged a button, typed code, and pressed F9. The EXE was ready. No dependencies. No container. No cloud.

Thousands of industrial and medical systems still run on Delphi 7 codebases.

If you wanted to make a “contact manager” that used an Access database? You had to buy the Professional edition or use third-party components (like ZeosLib, which retrofitted support).

: Native database connectivity tools (such as BDE, ADO, or DBExpress) were removed.

And it still compiles.