"All that in text mode..very nifty"

Sure, for dBASE development it was nifty. Paradox was fully object-based and PAL was at least as OOP as was VB sometime later. Paradox was a real Windows event-driven programming/database tool and should have - WOULD have - changed the world if not for Microsoft's horrible behavior. Insofar as it set the mold for all the "Visual" tools that showed up later, it DID change the world - and Borland gets no credit.